Standardize and automate workflows

One of the key HashiCorp principles is to design for workflows, not underlying technologies. Focusing on workflows gives you the flexibility to introduce new tools more easily to your organization as necessary. When establishing a culture of automation, you should also ensure that you regularly reflect on your operations procedures as your team evolves. You can more easily modify and adjust standardized automation procedures than inconsistent manual processes. This also allows you to review any operational failures and update your workflows accordingly.

Terraform allows you to standardize your cloud infrastructure workflow to manage resources across cloud providers, so you do not need to learn provider-specific workflows. Standard cloud infrastructure workflows let your team work more efficiently and enable you to choose the best service for the job rather than tying you to any one platform. HCP Terraform has run triggers that can combine multiple workflows. When one workflow completes, such as creating a Kubernetes cluster, a second workflow can start automatically to create a Vault instance for the Kubernetes cluster to use.

As highlighted in the reusable components section, you can use Packer to create a standard and automated workflow for multi-cloud deployments. Packer allows you to configure an image from a single configuration file called a template, which will create multiple images that can be ingested by cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, and GCP.

HashiCorp resources:

• Terraform multi-cloud provisioning
• Build a golden image pipeline with HCP Packer
• HCP Terraform Run triggers
• Implement HashiCorp's Tao and principles
• Get started with Terraform on AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI

Next steps

In this section of Define your processes, you learned how to standardize and automate workflows across cloud providers to improve team efficiency and enable flexible technology choices. Standardize and automate workflows is part of the Define and automate processes pillar.

Refer to the following documents to learn more about workflow standardization:

• Map your workflows to identify and document your current processes
• Create reusable modules to build standardized infrastructure components
• Implement CI/CD to implement automation for your standardized processes