Using Terraform for Database Management

In an effort to transform into an agile engineering organization, Vonage is adopting site reliability engineering (SRE) principles and moving away from manual, repetitive, and automatable tasks known as "toil." To address the challenges of database changes, such as schema alterations and ad-hoc modifications, Vonage has developed an automation framework that allows engineers to specify and run SQL queries on databases using a declarative and idempotent approach. The framework uses Terraform for state management, AWS SecretsManager for secure credential storage, and Python for execution, with Jenkins serving as the runner. To ensure safety and security, the framework performs checks on submitted pushplans, maintains an audit trail, and executes SQL statements safely. While there are still improvements to be made, this foundation provides a solid base for extending automation to other aspects of database management.