Software Toolkit
A Terraform scaffold that provisions serverless infrastructure, mocks APIs locally with AWS SAM and gives every developer their own sandbox per branch.
- Role
- Built it, lead the guild that owns it
- Where
- Storm Reply UK
- Stack
- Terraform, AWS SAM, Python, GitHub Actions
- Used by
- 20+ engineers
The problem
Setting up a new project used to take about two weeks before anyone wrote a feature: infrastructure, pipelines, environments and a way to test the API locally.
[In your words: what that setup looked like before the toolkit, and what went wrong when developers tested infrastructure changes.]
How it works
Scaffold the serverless basics
Twelve Terraform modules cover the building blocks of a serverless app, and a wizard scaffolds each new API endpoint so every project starts from the same shape.
Run the API locally
AWS SAM runs the API on your machine against the same Terraform code that deploys it.
A sandbox for every branch
The branch name is hashed into its own Terraform state, so anyone can run terraform apply from their laptop without touching anyone else's stack.
Keep it tidy
aws-nuke clears out abandoned sandboxes, and Checkov, tflint and pre-commit hooks run on every change.
Results
- to set up a new project
- 2 weeks → hours
- engineers use it
- 20+
- internal tool at Storm Reply UK
- Most used
It's also what the company's internal Promotion App, for goals and feedback, was built on.