My journey in managing online services

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As part of my journey to centralize and automate my computing life, one of my annoyances is having to configure services such as DNS or GitHub repositories every time I need to create or modify one.

I use Cloudflare to manage my domains and handle DNS configurations. Every time I got a new domain and/or DNS configuration, I had to go to Cloudflare and update the entries. Maybe a week later, I would realize I had made a mistake and had to track down what I had before to roll it back. Further, I use UptimeRobot to monitor some of my personal domains and get notified in case they become unavailable.

Over the years, GitHub and GitLab have become a little more complex. We now have CI/CD pipelines, deployment keys, secrets, branch rules, etc. With that, whenever I created a new repository, I had to configure all of that. Many of my repositories use similar configurations, so I had to replicate them across all of them.

Managing all of that was tedious. It was difficult to remember why I had created a dummy DNS entry in one of my Cloudflare zones, and it was tedious to configure a GitHub/GitLab repo.

For a couple of years now, I’ve been managing all of that with Terraform. It has reduced the risk of incorrect configurations, and I can look into the history to remember why I made a particular change and easily revert it.

I modularized my default GitHub/GitLab settings so that once I create a repository, it uses many of my default values unless specified otherwise. I can now copy and paste UptimeRobot configurations and change the domain to immediately start monitoring—no need to go to the dashboard, no need for mouse clicks 🤓.

Finally, I use Terraform Cloud to plan, apply, and store state, which makes it particularly simple and cost-effective. Terraform Cloud is connected to my GitHub repository, so on every push to main, it will plan and apply any changes.