Outpost

Self-service provisioning for short-lived cloud environments. Request a dev or staging environment, get a running ECS service and RDS database a few minutes later, and let it tear itself down when the TTL runs out — no ticket, no waiting on ops.

Built as a full platform: a FastAPI backend, a Terraform + GitHub Actions provisioning pipeline, a React dashboard, and a CLI.

How it works

1. You ask for an environment (name, type, TTL) through the UI or CLI.
2. The API writes a PENDING row and dispatches a GitHub Actions workflow.
3. Terraform provisions a VPC subnet, security group, ECS service, and RDS instance, then calls back to the API with the outputs.
4. The environment moves to RUNNING. A runbook is generated automatically — connection info, log commands, TTL reminder.
5. When the TTL expires (or you destroy it manually), Terraform tears everything down and the record is kept for the audit log.

Every AWS resource is tagged with env_id, team, and ttl, which is how cost tracking and targeted destroys work.

Stack

FastAPI · PostgreSQL · SQLAlchemy/Alembic · React + TypeScript + Tailwind · Terraform · GitHub Actions · AWS (ECS Fargate, RDS, Secrets Manager, CloudWatch)

Running it locally

cp .env.example .env   # fill in GitHub OAuth credentials
docker compose up

API comes up on :8000, UI on :3000. docker compose exec api alembic upgrade head to apply migrations.

The Terraform/AWS side needs a one-time bootstrap (S3 state bucket, DynamoDB lock table, shared ECS cluster, OIDC role) before any environment can actually provision — see terraform/README.md.

CLI

pip install -e ./cli
outpost auth login
outpost env create --name my-feature --type dev --ttl 24
outpost env list

Why it's built this way

A few decisions worth knowing before reading the code:

• Provisioning is async. POST /environments returns 202 immediately; Terraform runs in GitHub Actions and calls back when it's done. Terraform takes minutes, not milliseconds — blocking the request isn't an option.
• No static AWS credentials anywhere. GitHub Actions assumes an IAM role over OIDC. Nothing to rotate, nothing to leak.
• One Terraform workspace per environment, state keyed by env_id in S3. Destroying one environment can't touch another's resources.
• Environments are soft-deleted. The row, audit trail, and cost history survive destruction — you can still see what an environment cost and who killed it.

Status

Core platform (auth, RBAC, provisioning API, Terraform modules, GitHub Actions workflows, web UI) is built and tested. Live AWS provisioning is blocked on the one-time account bootstrap described above.