RingCentral Terraform Provider - Infrastructure as Code for Admins

Hi Yatin & Bryne,

I suggest just picking one. Terraform is certainly the go-to tool that we are seeing.

If you are looking to build something yourselves, a yaml-based configuration might work well, particularly if we can work with supplying variables as objects so that we can build out complex setups.

As a large retailer, each of our stores consists of a site, 2x IVRs, 3x Groups and 16 users. Being able to provision this as code would be so much easier as we could re-use the code to create each site or with Terraform build a module.

Below is a basic example in YAML I was thinking of, although its very akin to Ansible not Terraform:

tasks:
  - name: create cost centre
    rc_costcentre:
      cost_centre_name: "{{ name }}"
      billing_code: "{{ billing_code }}"

  - name: create site
    rc_site:
      site_name: "{{ name }}"
      site_code: "{{ site_code }}"
      site_address: "{{ address }}"
      cost_centre: "{{ name }}"    

  - name: create local number
      rc_local_number:
        number_location: "United Kingdom"
        number_type: "Local Number"
        county: "Hertfordshire"
        area_code: "Watford"
        assignment_type: "site"
        assign_to: "{{ name }}"

  - name: create user
    rc_user:
      license_type: "MVP"
      email: "{{ item.email }}"
      first_name: "{{ item.first_name }}"
      surname: "{{ item.surname }}"
      site_name: "{{ name }}"
      cost_centre: "{{ name }}"
      extension: "{{ item.extension }}"
      number_location: "United Kingdom"
      number_type: "Local Number"
      county: "Hertfordshire"
      area_code: "Watford"
      loop:
        {email: 'joe.bloggs@ringcentral.co.uk', first_name: 'Joe', last_name: 'Bloggs', extension: '301'}
        {email: 'jane.bloggs@ringcentral.co.uk', first_name: 'Jane', last_name: 'Bloggs', extension: '302'}

Fraz - building on Yatin's question. I am a Product Manager on the Platform team and want to learn more about this request. I would love a more detailed description of the kind of experience you are looking for, with examples, etc. Because It sounds like you are describing a new type of product. For example, what kinds of things would you need a definition file to enable you to perform?

Hi Fraz. Thanks for submitting the idea.

IaC could make things easier. That being said, the challenge might be to create and maintain different configurations for popular provisioning tools like Terraform, Ansible, and Puppet (and there could be more)

We might want to look into a solution that translates a common config into a tool-specific config (or at least the most popular ones) to reduce redundancy

Do you have anything in mind in terms of how the common configuration file should look like?

Also, are you guys using a tool that helps you achieve something similar?