So, what's the Plan?

Planning Cloud Infrastructure at Scale: Introducing Bluebricks Planner for Seamless Collaboration

In today’s cloud-first landscape, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has revolutionized how we build, deploy, and scale systems by automating manual processes, with Terraform leading the charge.

Central to IaC is the Terraform Plan — a detailed, text-based summary which outlines the changes Terraform will to your cloud infrastructure. This feature is intended to allow teams to catch potential errors, assess impacts, and make critical decisions to maintain stability and security before the planned changes become the reality.

As organizations scale in both infrastructure and teams, relying on a plan for infrastructure provisioning becomes increasingly difficult. Effective infrastructure management requires collaboration at every level, with teams from Security, Development, and IT sharing insights and working together. A static Plan alone cannot facilitate this collaboration.

Planning is More Than Just Having a Plan

As organizations grow and their cloud infrastructure scales, the limitations of static planning tools like Terraform become increasingly clear. A static plan might outline changes, but it falls short of what’s needed for managing dynamic, large-scale cloud environments. True planning is a continuous, collaborative process that addresses not just what will change, but how those changes will impact the broader infrastructure and teams involved.

As environments expand, several key pain points emerge:

Complexity Overload

As more resources, services, and configurations are added, plans rapidly expand into lengthy, intricate codebases. What used to be a manageable and clear diff, allowing teams to easily understand the impact of changes, becomes overwhelming. The sheer volume of information obscures key insights, making it harder for teams to assess changes and reducing the plan’s overall effectiveness in highlighting the true impact.

Collaboration Gaps

This is particularly true in large organizations with multiple specialized teams managing different aspects of infrastructure. Miscommunication becomes a significant risk as each team’s changes can have a ripple effect on others. A seemingly minor adjustment by one team can lead to unintended consequences for another, and without real-time collaboration and visibility into each other’s work, these gaps can go unnoticed, potentially leading to serious issues down the line.

Operational Conflicts

This is especially true in fast-moving environments where a Terraform plan only reflects the information relevant at the moment of its creation. As infrastructure evolves rapidly, the plan becomes outdated, leading to inaccuracies and state drift. Since the plan is based on the infrastructure state at that specific point in time, it quickly loses its reliability as a source of truth, causing conflicts and inefficiencies as teams unknowingly work with outdated information. Without robust communication and real-time collaboration capabilities, these gaps remain unaddressed, increasing the risk of misalignment and errors across teams.

These pain points highlight the need for a more robust approach—one focused on true planning that fosters collaboration, reduces complexity, and ensures the infrastructure can scale without disruption.

Effective Collaboration is key for Scaling

We developed the Bluebricks Planner to address the inherent scaling challenges when managing IaC, such as those posed by the Plan.

The Planner transforms complex Terraform plans into easy-to-understand, graphical insights. It is a scalable, collaborative, and intelligent solution that overcomes the inherent limitations of traditional Terraform planning, empowering organizations to manage their growing infrastructure with efficiency and clarity.

By reimagining how teams interact with Terraform plans, the Planner offers powerful features that tackle these challenges directly: It can take any Terraform plan and transform it into a clear, visual representation, enabling teams to visualize plans, search and filter critical information, highlight key actions, and collaborate seamlessly.

This ensures that every change can be thoroughly understood, evaluated, and aligned with organizational goals before it is applied.

Get Early Access to Bluebricks Planner

Ready to elevate your Terraform planning process? Leave your details today to gain early access and be among the first to optimize your infrastructure planning and execution.