From our work
Can our developers create infrastructure themselves?
Our own platform: every application via a merge request
Starting point
We run our own applications ourselves, among them the software inventory that checks our dependencies every night. For this we did not want a server on which someone sets things up by hand, but a platform of the kind we also recommend to clients.
What we did
The infrastructure is built with Terraform and Ansible; the applications run in Kubernetes and are delivered through GitOps with Argo CD. The platform provides HTTPS certificates and sign-in. A new application is a merge request containing its description; the pipeline checks it, and an approval puts it live.
Result
A new application gets its environment through a merge request, not by asking someone with server access. The software inventory runs on the same platform and checks it as well.
What we learned
An image tag such as “latest” does not change any manifest, so Argo CD sees no new version. That is why we pin every version in the repository, and an update is a merge request too.