Use PR automations for self-service

Use a PR Automation for an example Self-Service S3 bucket creation workflow

Overview

Cloud infrastructure changes rapidly, and often the manual nature of infrastructure-as-code workflows can become a drag on velocity, causing organizations to reach to more self-service approaches. This can involve stitching together Backstage, Gitlab, ArgoCD, or any other set of tools. Plural provides a single cloud orchestrator to provide all those key functionalities in one control plane.

We'll show how this can work beyond just a K8s provisioning usecase, to provisioning an S3 bucket, a common resource also needed by Kubernetes workloads. It'll operate by:

Creating a PR Automation (PRA) to make the provisioning of buckets repeatable
Using that PRA to create an InfrastructureStack to provision the s3 bucket using a Plural terraform stack.

Warning:

This Guide will not work properly unless you've finished the tutorial Integrate with your Source Control Provider.

Define the PR Automation

This PR Automation is going to leverage resources that have already been created in the plural up repo for you, in particular:

terraform/modules/blob/s3 - a basic s3 bucket module we've predefined that can be used for provisioning the bucket
templates/blobstore/* - a couple of templates that will be used to setup the blobstore provisioning process via a PRA

Given those manifests, the PR Automation yaml could be something like this, which you'd place in bootstrap/pr-automation/blobstore.yaml

yaml

apiVersion: deployments.plural.sh/v1alpha1
kind: PrAutomation
metadata:
  name: blob-creator
spec:
  name: blob-creator
  documentation: |
    Sets up a PR to provision a blobstore with a given type (eg s3) and region
  creates:
    templates:
    - source: templates/blob/stack.yaml
      destination: "services/blobstores/{{ context.type }}/{{ context.name }}.yaml"
      external: false
    - source: templates/blob/service.yaml
      destination: "bootstrap/blobstores.yaml"
      external: false
  scmConnectionRef:
    name: github
  title: "Adding a {{ context.type }} bucket {{ context.name }}"
  message: "Setup a stack to manage the {{ context.name }} {{ context.type }} bucket"
  identifier: your-org/your-plural-up-repo # <---- replace with the slug for your plural up repo
  configuration:
  - name: name
    type: STRING
    documentation: the name of this blob store (if using s3, this would become an s3 bucket name)
    validation:
      regex: "[a-z][a-z-0-9]+"
  - name: type
    type: ENUM
    documentation: the type of blob storage to provision
    values:
    - s3
  - name: region
    type: STRING
    documentation: the region your blobstore will live in