Sinking Atlantis - How Breaking up Our Infrastructure Monorepos Saved Us from Pul... Donnie Laughton

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Sinking Atlantis - How Breaking up Our Infrastructure Monorepos Saved Us from Pull Request Purgatory - Donnie Laughton, Recursion
Several years ago, the Recursion Engineering Infrastructure team naively adopted GitOps practices by connecting our GitOps tools (including atlantis and argocd) to broadly scoped infrastructure-as-code (IaC) monorepos. This allowed us to maintain positive control over changes to our infrastructure and allowed our software engineers to focus on application development. As we scaled, having our engineering infrastructure team in the release path started to decrease release velocity and 'pulled' us into PR purgatory. Over this past year, we reimagined our infrastructure provisioning patterns and refactored our IaC codebase with a focus on breaking out application-specific IaC into dedicated 'bounded context repos'. The result has empowered our software engineering teams with self-service resource provisioning while simultaneously making our infrastructure easier to reason over and maintain. In this talk, we will go over two different GitOps repo patterns for IaC, the pros and cons of each, how we made the pivot from one to the other and why we did it when we did.