How do you collaborate and review your infrastructure as code changes with your team?

1 Use version control and branching

One of the first steps to collaborate and review your IaC changes is to use a version control system, such as Git, to store and track your code. Version control enables you to create, update, and delete your code in a structured and organized way, and to keep a history of your changes and their impact. It also allows you to create branches, which are separate copies of your code that you can use to work on different features, fixes, or experiments, without affecting the main or master branch. Branching helps you isolate and test your changes before merging them back to the main branch, and also facilitates parallel development and code reviews among your team.

2 Follow coding standards and conventions

Another important aspect of collaborating and reviewing your IaC changes is to follow coding standards and conventions that make your code readable, maintainable, and consistent. Coding standards and conventions are a set of rules and guidelines that define how you write, format, structure, and document your code, such as naming conventions, indentation, comments, error handling, and testing. By following coding standards and conventions, you can improve the quality and clarity of your code, avoid common errors and bugs, and make it easier for your team to understand and review your code.

3 Use code reviews and pull requests

Code reviews and pull requests are essential practices for collaborating and reviewing your IaC changes, as they allow you to get feedback and approval from your peers before deploying your code to production. Code reviews are the process of examining and evaluating your code by other developers, who can provide suggestions, corrections, or validations for your changes. Pull requests are the mechanism of submitting your code changes from a branch to the main branch, where they can be reviewed and merged by other developers. Code reviews and pull requests help you ensure that your code meets the quality and security standards, follows the coding conventions, and aligns with the business and technical requirements.

5 Use continuous integration and delivery

Finally, you should use continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) tools and pipelines to collaborate and review your IaC changes. CI/CD tools and pipelines can help you automate and streamline the process of building, testing, and deploying your code to different environments, such as development, staging, or production. CI/CD tools and pipelines can also help you implement feedback loops and quality gates that can trigger or block your code deployments based on the results of your code reviews, tests, validations, and policies. For example, you can use tools like AWS CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, and CodePipeline to create and manage your CI/CD workflows for your IaC code. You can also use tools like AWS CodeReview, CodeGuru, or CodeStar to monitor and improve the performance, reliability, and security of your code.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?