Managing Environment Variables "At Scale"

[osterman]

what

• Describe the problem with too many environment variables and how to manage them

why

• There are a lot of ways to manage them. There are tradeoffs with all of them - thus a true "best practice" is hard to distill

examples

Here are a few approaches:

• Use chamber
• Use envconsul with HashiCorp vault
• Use Dockerfile with ENV parameters
• Use .tfvar files (with or without terragrunt)
• Use direnv with .envrc files

[osterman]

Ultimately, we want to achieve DRYness, but with clarity on when to use what.

[jdn-za]

.tfvars is the most intuitive, coming from the world of terraform.

direnv has been brilliant in projects where my directory structure has had a strong correlation to the project architecture (both logical and/or infrastructure)

I want to explore using docker file env parameters more, possibly with a more multi image layer approach.

[osterman]

I want to explore using docker file env parameters more, possibly with a more multi image layer approach.

The biggest downside with this is needing to rebuild the image, especially if using envs-inside-of-envs. We do this a lot today, but the impact on development is less desirable.