Infrastructure as code

Release's infrastructure runner applies your infrastructure-as-code (IaC) plans as part of your application's workflows.

Why use infrastructure as code with Release

Release creates Kubernetes clusters in your cloud account (currently AWS or GCP) to host your application's development, staging, and production environments. By deploying your application with Kubernetes, you can start up most of the services you need when the environment is created. But your application may also rely on external services that aren't a good fit for Kubernetes.

Stateful services such as databases, file storage, content delivery networks, and DNS configuration are typically provided by cloud providers such as AWS RDS, S3, CloudFront, and Route53.

Configuring external services manually each time you create a new environment would slow down your workflow and likely cause your development, staging, and production environments to diverge should you start using different services for different environments.

You can use an IaC tool alongside your Release environments to overcome this problem. With minimal configuration, an IaC tool can start, update, and destroy external cloud services for your environments.

Terraform

Terraform is the first IaC tool supported by Release's infrastructure runner, with Pulumi on the roadmap.

See our Terraform with Release documentation to start using Terraform for your environments.

Using Pulumi or other IaC tools

If you use an IaC tool besides Terraform, please contact your technical account manager for help. Release's job runners can run any scripts, including IaC runners, during your application's workflows.