Terraform Stacks

Source: Dev.to

Overview

A collection of production‑ready Terraform Stacks that showcase enterprise patterns across full applications, multi‑region fan‑out, and Kubernetes platforms. Each stack is a single hand‑off artifact—complete with documentation, diagrams, and well‑commented code—that platform teams can share with application squads to accelerate delivery.

Stacks let you compose multiple Terraform components into a single, versioned unit. Platform teams can ship one stack.hcl that wires dependencies (networking → storage → compute → operations) and expose only the inputs that matter. Consumers get a self‑service experience without having to understand the underlying module graph.

Key Advantages

• Single artifact delivery – one stack definition deploys an entire footprint (network, data, compute, observability) with dependency ordering handled automatically.
• Consistent multi‑environment rollouts – define multiple deployments (prod, staging, regions, or accounts) in the Stack; changes fan out automatically without copy/paste Terraform.
• Guardrails by default – opinionated tags, encryption, IAM scoping, dashboards, and alarms are shipped in every stack to meet enterprise baselines.
• Speed with safety – smaller plan surfaces and fewer moving parts versus layered, loosely coupled workspaces; easier to review, promote, and roll back.

Available Stacks

Application Stack (Project 1)

Deploy a full web application—including VPC, ALB + ECS Fargate, RDS + Secrets Manager, dashboards, and alarms—as a single Stack with multi‑deployment fan‑out.

Multi‑Region Stack (Project 2)

Stamp the same service across regions or accounts, including Route 53 failover, ALB + ECS, and DynamoDB global tables, without duplicating Terraform code.

Kubernetes Stack (Project 3)

Provision EKS, managed node groups, and platform add‑ons (ALB controller, metrics server) from one Stack, with IRSA wiring and kubeconfig outputs.

Pick the Stack that matches your use case and open its README for architecture diagrams, variables, and examples.

Getting Started

1. Install Terraform with the Stacks feature flag (or use Terraform Cloud/Enterprise Stacks).

2. Navigate to the desired Stack folder and run:

   terraform init
   terraform plan

3. Customize inputs in stack.hcl deployments (e.g., regions, CIDRs, cluster sizes). The dependency graph is already wired for you.

4. Promote with confidence: commit changes, run CI, and apply across deployments knowing that tagging, encryption, and observability baselines are built in.

References

• HashiCorp Stacks patterns and documentation.
• Connect on LinkedIn.