I just shipped my new backlog software โ€” and this wasnโ€™t just a weekend project:

  • Over 195,000 words (194641 to be exact) of engineering, research, and problem-solving (including nearly 34,000 words (33882) with Gemini 2.5 Pro as my AI copilot) went into the full stack.

From Day One, it was Infrastructure as Code:

  • ๐ŸŒŽ Terraform powered the entire Google Cloud foundation:
    Projects, Cloud Run, SQL (Postgres), Artifact Registry, service accounts, networking, and permissions โ€” all version-controlled, reproducible, and audit-proof.

Whatโ€™s live and running in production?

  • โ˜๏ธ Google Cloud Run: Fully serverless Python/Flask app, scalable and maintenance-free.
  • ๐Ÿ—„๏ธ Cloud SQL (Postgres): Secure, reliable database in the cloud โ€” no manual setup.
  • ๐Ÿ”’ Real user authentication: Credentials are hashed, managed, and validated in the database โ€” no plaintext, no shortcuts.
  • ๐Ÿค– Automated CI/CD with GitHub Actions:
    • Every commit triggers a full build, container push to Artifact Registry, and automatic deploy to Cloud Run.
    • Uses secure key-based authentication via GitHub Secrets and Google Cloud IAM Service Accounts (WIF/OIDC coming soon).
  • ๐Ÿ“ฆ Artifact Registry: Modern, managed container storage; no more legacy gcr.io.
  • ๐Ÿ› ๏ธ Zero manual steps: Every resource, permission, and deployment is code-driven.
  • ๐Ÿ”‘ Secret management: All sensitive info managed as GitHub Actions secrets โ€” never in code or config files.

Takeaways:

  • Terraform-first made it fast to scale, test, and iterate โ€” and future-proofs the whole stack.
  • With a real CI/CD pipeline, every deployment is safe, repeatable, and production-ready.
  • AI support is powerful โ€” but real-world debugging, persistence, and community wisdom made the difference.

Next steps:
Feature upgrades, UI/UX polish, and maybe open source.
Infrastructure is code, automation is king โ€” and everything is built to grow.


#Terraform #IaC #GoogleCloud #CloudRun #CI_CD #DevOps #Python #Docker #ArtifactRegistry #Automation #Flask #MVP #AI #Productivity