Using Terraform as a lingua franca to talk infrastructure as code with our customer teams helps shorten implementation times for new projects and aids in new feature adoption. Terraform is the first stop for our largest customers, since it gives them compliance and comprehensive templates for new teams and services added to their PagerDuty account.

Translating real-world teams, services, and other organizational structures into PagerDuty objects can be challenging. Teams are busy, and the PagerDuty Operations Cloud isn’t their only tool.

To help this effort, and supplement our Terraform provider documentation, we put together a project to help relate the Real World to Terraform to PagerDuty for our users. We created a fictional organization, and described their requirements. We used Terraform as our Rosetta Stone to help guide the fictional team to success with their PagerDuty account, adding the “why” and “when” to the “how” of our regular documentation, along with a rigorous improvement to our sample code. In this session, we’ll take you through our project, the lessons we wanted to teach our users, and the lessons we learned ourselves about our products.