Architecture Synchronization

Definition

When managing cloud infrastructures at scale, you may want to keep your environments (e.g. QA, staging, production) close to each other.

You can achieve this by synchronizing an architecture across multiple environments, which means that any modification you do on one environment will be automatically replicated/synchronized with all synced environments, except the values of the variables that are supposed to be specific to each environment.

This allows you to maintain a consistent infrastructure across all your development, testing, and production environments.

Create a synced environment

Here are the steps you can follow to implement environment sync in Brainboard:

1. Create the design and Terraform configuration for a specific architecture within a specific environment, for example: Development.

2. Go to Projects and open the project where your architecture is saved.

3. Now, right-click on the architecture that you want to sync and click on the Duplicate button. It will open the Clone architecture modal for you to enter the following information:

   1. Project: Select the desired project.

   2. Target environment: Add the target environment where you want to clone your architecture. For example, QA.

   3. Name: You can assign a different name to the cloned architecture.

   4. Description (optional)

   5. Sync: Turn this toggle on to keep the source and destination architectures in sync.

The variables values are not synced, so you can use different values for different environments. Refer to the Variables to know more about the variables

View synced environments

Once the architecture is synced, you see a new Sync Information clickable icon in the options bar. When you click on it, you can see all synchronized environments for this architecture.

Un-sync environment

To un-sync a specific architecture or environment, click on the same sync icon available in the options bar. On the Synced architectures modal, click the Unsync button for the architecture to unlink it from the synchronized environments. On the confirmation popup, click the Unsync architecture button to confirm the unsyncing action.

Best practices

Use this process to apply changes to all environments consistently.

For example, you might use the Brainboard CI/CD engine to apply different pipelines to different environments while keeping the design of the cloud architecture consistent through all environments.

Refer to the CI/CD Engine to learn more about it.

Use variables and other configuration options to customize each environment as needed.

For example, you might use different values for variables like the number of instances or the size of a database depending on the environment.

By using Brainboard to implement environment sync, organizations can ensure that their infrastructure is consistent across different environments, reducing the risk of drift, configuration errors and improving overall reliability.