Freelance Terraform consultant
Terraform is the tool I reach for first, and has been on every engagement since 2018. The hard part is rarely the syntax. It is usually an estate that was built by hand and now has to become code.
Scope
What I take on
Bringing click-ops under control
Importing an existing, hand-built estate into state without a rebuild. It is messy work, and it is where most teams stall.
Module design
A module library your team can actually use: sensible interfaces, versioned and documented, and never so abstract that it is harder to read than the resources themselves.
State strategy
Backends, workspace and environment layout, locking, and blast radius, so a mistake in staging cannot reach production.
The layer underneath
Ansible or Puppet for configuration management where Terraform stops. I have run both in production.
Method
How it runs
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01
Small, reviewable changes
Infrastructure changes should go through review like any other code, and a plan should be readable by someone who did not write it. If the plan output needs explaining every time, the code is wrong.
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02
Import before rewrite
Rebuilding an estate from scratch to "do it properly" is how migrations die. Import what exists, get it green, then improve it under version control.
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03
Hand over something your team can extend
The deliverable is modules and documentation your engineers own. If your team cannot extend it after I leave, it was not finished.
Evidence
Where I have done this before
- Knab Migrated legacy infrastructure to IaC with Terraform and PowerShell, which made environments across a regulated estate consistent and reproducible.
- LeasePlan Replaced manual OpenText instance setup with Terraform and Ansible Tower, which removed a large share of the repetitive configuration work.
- Patchman Orchestrated an entire Linode VM estate with Puppet and kept every node consistent.
Fit
Probably worth a conversation if
- Your infrastructure exists only in the console and in one person's memory.
- You have Terraform, but it has become a tangle nobody wants to run plan against.
- Environments drift, and nobody is sure how staging differs from production.
- You want IaC set up properly once, by someone who has untangled it before.
Contact
Tell me what is actually broken
The contact details live on the front page. If I am not the right person for this, I will say so.