FOSS4G 2022 general tracks

Using Terraform to manage HOTOSM's infrastructure as code
08-26, 15:15–15:20 (Europe/Rome), Modulo 0

Humanitarian Openstreetmap Team (HOT) administers several free-software applications with varied deployment architectures on multiple cloud platforms. As an organization that values openness and transparency, we actively seek out open source tools that help us enact our principles of open participation and collaboration. In that vein, we chose Terraform as the tool for managing infrastructure at HOT.

Using HOT's experience managing OSM Galaxy infrastructure using Terraform, this talk describes our use of Terraform to manage infrastructure at scale in order to improve DevOps processes with infrastructure reproducibility, security, cost and change management.

We will present these advantages in the context of our own team's experiences and the challenges we faced trying to build a scaling technology stack and compare Terraform with popular Infrastructure as Code (IaC) alternatives.

The talk will use OSM Galaxy API (galaxy.hotosm.org) as a case study to describe the process of porting infrastructure to Terraform in order to manage infrastructure continuously at enterprise scale - which is particularly relevant for non-profits and organizations that develop compute-intensive technology.

See also: Slides (2.2 MB)

DK is currently the DevOps Manager for HOT's Technology and Innovation Team. They were building FOSS since 2013, working on OpenDroneMap development, and have been attending FOSS4G since Bonn in 2016. With HOT, they are building open geospatial applications in the cloud that support disaster response and humanitarian development.

This speaker also appears in:

Yogesh Girikumar works at Humanitarian Openstreetmap Team (HOT) in the DevOps team and handles application deployments, reliability, security and performance for all services administered by HOT.

Yogesh has over 10 years of experience with Linux and Cloud administration and has been an enthusiast mapper of public access amenities like libraries and transit routes (in India) on Openstreetmap for several years.