Infrastructure Engineering

Purpose

Infrastructure code has the highest blast radius of any code in a project. A misconfigured security group can expose a database publicly. A missing IAM boundary can allow privilege escalation. This skill treats infrastructure as code with the same rigor as application code: reviewed, versioned, and tested before apply.

SOP: Infrastructure Provisioning

Step 1 - Stack Discovery (Critical Gate)

Before writing a single .tf file, confirm:

1. What is the cloud provider? (AWS, GCP, Azure, DigitalOcean)
2. Does a Terraform state file already exist? (terraform.tfstate, or remote state in S3/GCS?)
3. What environments need to be provisioned? (development, staging, production - or just one?)
4. Is there an existing VPC or network topology that must be matched?

Never run terraform apply on an existing environment without first running terraform plan and reviewing the output.

Step 2 - Terraform Module Structure

Organize infrastructure into modules, not one monolithic main.tf: