Unlocking cloud with GitOps with Terraform and Sentinel at AGL Energy

Many organizations are not pure cloud-native or still totally on-prem ITIL. They're often somewhere in between. Lachlan White, DevOps architect at AGL Energy, created a visualization for what this looks like. Typically it means power struggles over who has authority for what (often stemming from the cross-cutting "DevOps engineer" role) and disorganized communication from shifts in roles and responsibilities. Armon Dadgar illustrates this "contain and drain" migration well in his whiteboard presentation: Balancing Centralized & Federated IT in a DevOps Transformation.

What if there was a better way...

At AGL Energy, Lachlan brought his vision of an operating model to life. His vision included a focus on:

• GitOps: A deployment and infrastructure as code (IaC) process that treats Git version control as the central source of truth.

• InnerSource: Running internal development and operations the same way you would run an open source project and community.

• Re-usable, collaborative IaC: Using Terraform modules to scale expertise and keep control of reusable components in the hands of specialized teams.

• Policy as code: Using the Sentinel policy as code framework in HashiCorp products to automate compliance checks, allowing for quick feedback rather than weeks-long ticket-based reviews.

Watch this VirtualDays APAC session to understand the details of AGL Energy's migration to a cloud operating model and see how they used HashiCorp's Terraform Enterprise to achieve its goals and a host of benefits.

Additional Resources

• The HashiCorp Cloud Operating Model

• Visualising a Cloud Native Operating Model for Enterprise Adoption

• What Australia’s AGL Energy Learned About Cloud Native Compliance

Slides

See this slide deck on Prezi.

Browse the rest of the VirtualDays APAC sessions.