GitOps and IaC at Scale – AWS, ArgoCD, Terragrunt, and OpenTofu – Part 1

level 400 Welcome, builders! In this blog series, we will explore the exciting world of GitOps and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) at scale, focusing on the powerful combination of ArgoCD and Open Tofu and how those tools and frameworks can live together for improving your deployments and reduce the TOIL. The main purpose is to learn some patterns and considerations for increasing efficiency, improving the automation infrastructure provisioning without loss compliance and security requirements Scenario Suppose that you are a Cloud Engineer or DevOps engineer, and you have a mission, deploy a cloud native infrastructure to support a modern e-commerce application that offers the possibility to any buy and sell gems. You must implement a system to allow the operations at scale, keep the governance, use IaC and consider the least manual tasks for the setup and onboarding for the developers. The cloud provider for the organization is AWS and the main infrastructure services are EKS, RDS, VPC. Don’t forget that availability, security, and cost efficiency requirements. In the previous blogs about IaC at scale the main questions and base guidelines was answered to apply the best practices, however, when talking about Kubernetes and cloud native apps many questions emerge from the shadows and suppose al challenge for the technical skills, for example: What are the best practices to manage the cluster configuration at scale? How can you connect both layers IaC and GitOps? What are the GitOps topologies? What are the best tools? How can you improve developer experience? Of course, with an AI assistant you can find pretty answers for those questions and some guides. But, we are builders and here we put a real-life example based on experiences and some challenges in a productive environment. First, some theory and good practices

Feb 13, 2025 - 18:50

GitOps and IaC at Scale – AWS, ArgoCD, Terragrunt, and OpenTofu – Part 1

level 400

Welcome, builders! In this blog series, we will explore the exciting world of GitOps and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) at scale, focusing on the powerful combination of ArgoCD and Open Tofu and how those tools and frameworks can live together for improving your deployments and reduce the TOIL. The main purpose is to learn some patterns and considerations for increasing efficiency, improving the automation infrastructure provisioning without loss compliance and security requirements

Scenario

Suppose that you are a Cloud Engineer or DevOps engineer, and you have a mission, deploy a cloud native infrastructure to support a modern e-commerce application that offers the possibility to any buy and sell gems. You must implement a system to allow the operations at scale, keep the governance, use IaC and consider the least manual tasks for the setup and onboarding for the developers. The cloud provider for the organization is AWS and the main infrastructure services are EKS, RDS, VPC. Don’t forget that availability, security, and cost efficiency requirements.

In the previous blogs about IaC at scale the main questions and base guidelines was answered to apply the best practices, however, when talking about Kubernetes and cloud native apps many questions emerge from the shadows and suppose al challenge for the technical skills, for example:

What are the best practices to manage the cluster configuration at scale?
How can you connect both layers IaC and GitOps?
What are the GitOps topologies?
What are the best tools?
How can you improve developer experience?

Of course, with an AI assistant you can find pretty answers for those questions and some guides. But, we are builders and here we put a real-life example based on experiences and some challenges in a productive environment.

First, some theory and good practices