Terraform on Google Cloud maturity model

This page explains the maturity model for Terraform on Google Cloud. This model provides best practices, recommendations, and learning materials that meet you at your level of comfort and expertise with Terraform on Google Cloud.

Overview

Terraform on Google Cloud has three user personas (Learners, Builders, and Operators), and three stages of the maturity model (Adopt, Build, and Scale).

As organizations advance through the process of adopting, building, and scaling Terraform on Google Cloud for their infrastructure use-cases, they need accessible learning materials that provide the guidance they need wherever they are at on their journey.

Determine which of these personas represent you the best and look at the associated content to find resources that will help you and your organization advance through the maturity stages, enabling you to apply your use case to Terraform on Google Cloud at scale.

Adopt (Learner)

Learners are beginning their journey on Google Cloud and focus on opinionated guidance to learn how to use Terraform on Google Cloud and adopt it for their use case.

They may have some knowledge of Bash or other scripting languages, but they don't use automation or CI/CD today to provision infrastructure.

Build (Builder)

Builders have experience with Infrastructure as Code and use Google Cloud to build their projects.

They work with foundational infrastructure and a few applications on Google Cloud. Builders plan on growing their cloud usage, specific use cases, and customizations, and think about scaling and onboarding more teams or applications.

Scale (Operator)

Operators are experienced with Google Cloud and use Terraform to provision infrastructure for their workloads at scale.

They scale and grow cloud usage, specific use cases, customizations, and onboard more teams and workloads. Operators set policies and self serve workflows for workload teams.

You may be a Learner if you are:

• a developer
• new to Google Cloud, Infrastructure as Code, or Terraform

You may be a Builder if you are:

• a developer
• on a platform admin team
• on a Cloud team
• a SRE
• familiar with working on Google Cloud, Terraform, and have a Infrastructure as Code operation model

You may be an Operator if you are:

• on a platform admin team
• on a Cloud team
• a SRE
• experienced operating a Google Cloud, and a Terraform operation model at scale

Criteria

This table details some of the criteria for each maturity stage to help you determine which fits best with your level of familiarity with Terraform on Google Cloud and your use case.

	Adopt	Build	Scale
Method	UI, CLI, and/or Terraform as a Service	Infrastructure as Code via Infra Manager	Infrastructure as Code via (1) Terraform OSS + Custom Pipelines or (2) Terraform Enterprise on Google Cloud
Automation	None or Limited	Limited	Yes
Consistency	None or Limited	Limited	Yes
Configuration	Unstructured, stored in a variety of locations	Structured, stored in a central location	Structured, stored in a version control system and versioned
Deployment	Manual	Automated using a CI/CD pipeline	Automated using a CI/CD pipeline
State	Not stored	Stored in a central location	Stored in a central location
Drift	Not monitored or managed	Monitored and managed	Monitored and managed
Documentation	Not maintained	Maintained	Well-documented
Review and Approval	Not required	Required	Required
Integration with Cloud Management Platform	Not integrated	Not integrated	Integrated with a cloud management platform
Range of Cloud Resources	Limited	Wide	Wide
Cost Optimization	Some concern	Some concern	Used
Security	Not a concern	Some concern	High concern
Compliance	Not a concern	Some concern	High concern

Recommendations

The following table lists some recommended topics based on the maturity stage of your organization and your use case with Terraform on Google Cloud.

	Adopt	Build	Scale
Discover & Learn	Terraform on Google Cloud Landing page HashiCorp Terraform docs	Terraform on Google Cloud docs HashiCorp Terraform docs	Architecture Center
Training & Tutorials	Get Started - Google Cloud (HashiCorp Learning Center) Get started with Terraform Basic Terraform commands Best practices Cloud Skill Boost for Terraform (Beginner)	Manage infrastructure as code Cloud Skill Boost for Terraform (Intermediate) Cloud Foundations Toolkit 101 Reuse Configuration with Modules	Export resources into Terraform Import resources into Terraform state Cloud Skill Boost for Terraform (Advanced) Policy: gcloud terraform vet
Templates/ Ready to use	Jump Start Solutions Google Cloud Terraform modules on GitHub Terraform Registry	Customize Jump Start Solutions Customize Terraform Blueprints and Modules Create your own Terraform Blueprint Create your own Terraform module	Google Cloud Terraform modules on GitHub (customize for scale) Create & publish your own standardized Terraform Blueprints and modules
Deploy & Manage	Infrastructure Manager Cloud Shell + Terraform	Infrastructure Manager Terraform GitOps with Cloud Build (CI/CD) Terraform Cloud or Enterprise on Google Cloud	Terraform GitOps with Cloud Build (CI/CD) Terraform Cloud or Enterprise on Google Cloud Getting started with Terraform CDK in GCP
	Support
	Google Cloud Cloud Customer Care Google Cloud + HashiCorp Support (Priority support if customer has support for both)