[user5994461]

Few years ago, I inherited the whole infrastructure for a fintech startup. It was few hundreds instances in AWS. The company was possibly the first to operate fully in the cloud and pass financial regulations for that.

At the heart of it, there was a short list of instances to run with their purposes. Most of everything was automated around that. You could add a line to order any resources in the world and have it running in the next 5 minutes. Instance provisioned with standard OS setup and patches, DNS and aliases up, permissions for developers and services deployed.

It was extremely efficient and well organized. I'm not sure who wrote it but I'm pretty sure it's the only guy in the world who figured out how to use AWS, accidentally.

While I worked there, I updated it to support provisioning in any region, EBS backups, automated firewall groups and a few other things. Everything was tagged consistently with purpose/team/environment for identification and billing.

It was neat. I doubt I will ever find again a company that can setup hardware or manage resources any decently.

To conclude this. A coworker told me that new guys were hired after I left and they undid most of it in the next 2 years.

[dangwu]

Sounds like he basically wrote his own CloudFormation

[user5994461]

It was mostly using ansible actually. The integrations are pretty good, better than what you can get with Terraform or CloudFormation.