[New Process Improvement Proposal]: Standardize Terraform Module Library Aligned with SLIM Best Practices

[sjoshi-jpl]

Checked for duplicates

No - I haven't checked

Category

Software Lifecycle - the creation, change, and release of software

Describe the need

With the increasing adoption of Terraform across JPL teams, there's a growing need to standardize IaC (infrastructure-as-code) practices to promote reusability, maintainability, and consistency. I am proposing a centralized Terraform repo that aligns fully with SLIM best practices (modular design, input validation, CI checks, versioning, and documentation).

This will help promote code reuse across multiple JPL projects, ensure infra deployments follow SLIM-aligned best practices, and enable safer deployments via standardized validations and CI integrations (workflows).

Next Steps:

1. Align with SLIM team on priority and scope.
2. Determine repo ownership and permissions.
3. Start with handful of high-impact modules (e.g. VPC, S3, IAM roles, RDS, ECS)

[riverma]

This is an excellent idea. Thanks so much for putting this ticket together. Let me give you a quick link about our process for adding a new best practice. I think the idea for a Terraform repo sounds great especially if those templates can be reused for many different purposes in terms of different project use cases. I think this would be an exciting opportunity as well to integrate with our AI enhancements such that the Terraform scripts could be automatically adapted to particular projects. See our Slim CLI tool which is leading the way here. Let's talk more and discuss a plan! 🚀