An elegant platform

This post details the evolution of Grab's data streaming platform (Coban) from a pure Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) approach using Terraform and Atlantis to a three-tier control plane (Coban UI, Heimdall, Khone). The new system addresses the limitations of IaC by providing a user-friendly UI (Coban UI) for resource creation, a Go backend (Heimdall) to translate UI actions into IaC, and a Git repository (Khone) for storing Terraform code and CI pipelines. This enhances stability, scalability, security, and user adoption by abstracting away the complexity of IaC tools and providing a controlled self-service experience.