Quest GitOps (short)

What it is

• Terraform code that deploys AWS infrastructure needed by the Quest app (VPC, ALB, ECS, ECR).

Purpose

• Keep infrastructure as code and run Terraform from GitHub Actions so CI can plan/apply/destroy.

How to trigger

• Push to main: workflow runs a terraform plan (checks for changes).
• Actions → Terraform Plan & Apply → Run workflow (choose plan, apply, or destroy).

Basic things to know

• Set these GitHub secrets: AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, TERRAFORM_STATE_BUCKET.
• The workflow passes the bucket name to terraform init via -backend-config.
• Create S3 bucket once (see backend.hcl.example). If you want state locking in production, create a DynamoDB lock table and add dynamodb_table to your backend config.
• For local runs use terraform init -backend-config=backend.hcl and pass -var='manage_state_bucket=false'.

That's it — the GitHub Actions runner runs terraform apply against your AWS account using the repo's code and the provided secrets.

Validation Steps

For a complete walkthrough of validating the setup, see TERRAFORM_VALIDATION.md.

Workflow Diagram

GitHub Actions Runner
        ↓
  AWS Credentials (from secrets)
        ↓
  terraform init -backend-config
        ↓
  terraform validate
        ↓
  terraform plan
        ↓
  [Manual Review]
        ↓
  terraform apply / destroy
        ↓
  AWS Resources (VPC, ALB, ECS, ECR)
        ↓
      Terraform State → S3 (optional: DynamoDB locking)

Cost Estimation

Rough AWS costs (us-east-1, on-demand):

• ALB: $16/month + data processing ($0.25/GB)
• ECS Fargate: ~$15/month (256MB, 0.25 CPU)
• ECR: $0.10/GB/month for storage
• S3/DynamoDB: Minimal (<$1/month for state storage)

Total: ~$30-50/month for production-like setup

Contributing

Before committing changes to main, ensure:

# Validate Terraform syntax
terraform validate

# Check formatting
terraform fmt -check

# Plan changes and review
terraform plan -var='manage_state_bucket=false'

# Commit only .tf files and documentation
git add *.tf *.md README.md

References

• Terraform AWS Provider Docs
• GitHub Actions Secrets
• AWS S3 Backend