Novem Infrastructure and Preview Environments

Project: Novem Infrastructure

Situation

The Novem application needed repeatable infrastructure for staging, production, and pull-request previews, with environment separation, DNS management, databases, workers, and explicit production safeguards.

Task

Manage the cloud infrastructure and deployment lifecycle as code, including preview environments that could be created and removed with a pull request.

Action

Built Terraform configurations for DigitalOcean App Platform applications, PostgreSQL, and Redis/Valkey resources
Added modules for web services, environment variables, and Cloudflare DNS
Managed AWS S3 Terraform state and secrets through SOPS and environment variables
Added staging, production, and preview environments with different approval rules
Automated preview application naming, unique state paths, DNS records, and cleanup on pull-request close
Connected infrastructure changes to GitHub Actions and application deployment workflows
Added migration jobs, worker configuration, health checks, and optional Papertrail or Logtail forwarding

Result

Created a repeatable deployment foundation with isolated environments and a safer production path. Pull requests can receive temporary application environments for review without sharing one fixed staging deployment.

Technologies

Terraform, DigitalOcean App Platform, PostgreSQL, Redis/Valkey, Cloudflare DNS, AWS S3, SOPS, GitHub Actions, Docker, doctl