Date: 2024-09-30
Time: 16:30–17:20
Room: Club Parlor
Level: Intermediate
In the beginning, there was one database - a labor of love, manually constructed. The roles and privileges – birthed directly from psql by an optimistic engineer at the dawn of our journey.
Then, another database emerged.
And another. Quickly, this becomes untenable. Perhaps you've dabbled in scripting the creation of new roles, but what happens when the script takes a dark turn? Or worse, when you must alter the ancient permissions? Have you ever tumbled into the abyss of peculiar legacy users and arcane database configurations? The task of provisioning and managing an organization's infrastructure has been a longstanding challenge. However, over the past decade, a new paradigm has emerged - declarative configuration, with Terraform at its helm. While Terraform has been widely adopted to provision various AWS resources, the question arises - can we harness its power for our databases?
Over the past two years, Brex has embarked on a journey of evolution in managing our users on a rapidly expanding database fleet. We've transitioned from manual care, to scripts, to custom software, and now, to Terraform. In this talk, we'll traverse the peaks and valleys of our journey, and share insights on what to be mindful of as we adopt and import our legacy systems into Terraform for Postgres.