Transition to Terraform deployments
Hi all! for context, I’m still a relatively new engineer working in a business with a fairly immature Azure environment.
At the moment, we deploy all of our Azure resources manually through the portal, but I’ve been trying learn more about IaC with the goal of eventually transitioning us towards managing everything through Terraform instead. (Terraform over Bicep as there are plans to expand into GCP in the future)
One thing I’m struggling to understand is around our current change/documentation process.
Before creating or modifying resources, we usually produce a spec sheet in Excel. It contains all the Azure resources & settings we commonly use, and we fill in the relevant values/options for the deployment. It works well because:
- Non-technical staff can easily review and understand it
- It clearly shows what’s changing
- It doubles as documentation for future reference
- It fits nicely into our change management/review process
The problem is that moving to Terraform feels like we’d now be doing the same work twice:
- Fill out the Excel spec sheet
- Then manually recreate all of that again in Terraform
If we skipped the Excel part and only used Terraform, I think a lot of non-technical stakeholders/reviewers would struggle to understand the changes as easily.
Am I thinking about this the wrong way? How do other businessed manage this?
EDIT: I have thought about using AI to generate the Excel spec sheets based off the Terraform files as well as a general summary of what's new/changing, would be interested to hear if anyone else has done something similar.