Practice : Standardised Terraform and IaC Patterns

Purpose and Strategic Importance

Standardised Terraform and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Patterns improve system reliability, security, and delivery efficiency by providing reusable, consistent, and proven infrastructure templates for teams to build upon. By aligning on shared patterns, organisations reduce duplication, lower risk, and accelerate infrastructure delivery with confidence.

Without standardised IaC, teams reinvent infrastructure solutions, introduce inconsistency, increase operational risk, and waste time resolving common errors, ultimately slowing delivery and degrading system resilience.

Description of the Practice

  • Reusable, version-controlled Terraform modules or IaC templates are provided for common infrastructure components (e.g. networking, compute, storage, observability).
  • Patterns incorporate best practices for security, resilience, scalability, and compliance.
  • Teams adopt these patterns to provision infrastructure consistently, reducing cognitive load and rework.
  • Patterns are maintained collaboratively, with improvements benefiting all teams.

How to Practise It (Playbook)

1. Getting Started

  • Identify common infrastructure components that require standardisation.
  • Develop initial Terraform modules or IaC templates with clear documentation.
  • Establish a central repository and versioning strategy for reusable patterns.
  • Educate teams on how to adopt and contribute to the patterns.

2. Scaling and Maturing

  • Expand the library to cover more complex use cases and evolving requirements.
  • Integrate automated testing, security scanning, and policy enforcement into pattern pipelines.
  • Track adoption rates and gather feedback to guide continuous improvement.
  • Collaborate with security, platform, and engineering teams to evolve patterns safely.

3. Team Behaviours to Encourage

  • Adopt shared patterns rather than building bespoke infrastructure solutions.
  • Provide feedback and contribute improvements to the shared library.
  • Treat patterns as living assets that evolve with system and business needs.
  • Embrace consistency as a lever for improving speed, reliability, and resilience.

4. Watch Out For…

  • Patterns that are overly rigid or fail to meet real-world requirements.
  • Teams bypassing patterns due to lack of support or flexibility.
  • Patterns becoming outdated, unmaintained, or misaligned with evolving standards.
  • Poor documentation undermining adoption and confidence.

5. Signals of Success

  • Infrastructure is provisioned consistently and reliably across teams.
  • Delivery speed increases as teams reuse proven patterns.
  • Security, resilience, and compliance are embedded by default.
  • Teams report reduced friction and cognitive load when working with infrastructure.