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What you need to know

Gruntwork accelerates your infrastructure. Our products allow you to treat your infrastructure like you do your application: as code, complete with pull requests and peer reviews. Our products require a variety of skills to maintain and customize to your needs over time.

Terraform​

Our modules are all built using Terraform. You should be comfortable using Terraform for Infrastructure as Code.

Terragrunt​

If you purchase the Reference Architecture, it is delivered in Terragrunt, our open source wrapper around Terraform which allows you to

  1. Separate your monolithic Terraform state files into smaller ones to speed up your plans and applies
  2. Keep your infrastructure code DRY

See How to Manage Multiple Environments with Terraform and our Terragrunt Quick start documentation for more details.

Git and GitHub​

Our code is stored in Git repositories in GitHub. You must have a working knowledge of Git via SSH (add, commit, pull, branches, et cetera) and GitHub (Pull requests, issues, et cetera) in order to interface with the Reference Architecture and our code library.

Knowledge of Go, Shell, and Python​

Some of the modules we have leverage Go, Shell scripting and Python. To customize these to suit your needs, you may need to dive in and make changes. In addition, all of our automated testing is written in Go, so familiarity with Go is highly recommended.

AWS​

To be successful with the infrastructure provisioned by us, you must have a decent working knowledge of AWS, its permissions schemes (IAM), services, and APIs. While having AWS certification is not required, it is certainly helpful. Since Gruntwork is an accelerator for your AWS infrastructure and not an abstraction layer in front of AWS, knowledge of AWS and the services you intend to use is required.

Containerization tools like Docker and Packer​

We create Docker containers throughout our code library, and use them heavily in our Gruntwork Pipelines product, an important piece of the Reference Architecture. Containerization is an important part of helping many companies scale in the cloud, and we’re no exception. Familiarity with creating docker images and pushing and pulling them from repositories is required. Likewise, we use Packer to build AMIs. Understanding Packer will enable you to build your own AMIs for your own infrastructure and make modifications to the infrastructure we provision for you.