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Workflows

Massdriver's data model, automations, and IaC plugin model compose into the building blocks of a cloud management platform — one where environments fork, configs promote, previews stand up on every PR, and the people who know how the infrastructure works don't have to be in the room for every change.

Three pieces make that possible:

  • A real data model. Projects, environments, instances, resources, and the connections between them are first-class entities with identifiers, ACLs, attributes, version history, and an audit log. Forking an environment is an API call, not a copy-paste exercise.
  • Automations that already know your graph. forkEnvironment, copyInstance, deployEnvironment, decommissionEnvironment, setEnvironmentDefault, and related mutations are idempotent by construction. The workflows in this section compose them — no glue scripts, no "what-order-do-I-run-these-in."
  • IaC as the plugin model. Your Terraform, OpenTofu, Helm, and Bicep bundles tell Massdriver what a "database," "cluster," or "queue" is. Publish a bundle, and every workflow — fork, promote, preview, deploy — composes it the same way.

The CLI command for every workflow here is one line. Wrap it in CI, drop it in a cron job, paste it into a Slack workflow — same primitives either way.

Workflows in this section​

  • Fork an environment — clone an existing environment into a new one. Use it for spinning up staging from prod, ramping a developer's personal env off staging, or any time you want a controlled copy you can diverge from.
  • Promote configs across environments — push a validated configuration from one instance to another (e.g. staging → prod). The destination ends up with a plan deployment for review before anything ships.
  • Preview environments from the CLI — declare a preview env in a single YAML file and run one command on every PR. Forks the base env, pins environment defaults, applies per-instance overrides, and deploys — every step idempotent, so re-running converges the env back to the declared state.

API and CLI as a framework on the platform you're building​

The API exposes a developer platform — projects, environments, instances, resources, and the operations that mutate them. Your IaC bundles (Terraform, OpenTofu, Helm, Bicep) are how you teach that platform what a "database," "cluster," "queue," or any other abstraction means in your organization. Once a bundle is published it becomes a first-class noun; every consumer — a developer in the UI, the CLI in CI, a script against GraphQL, an internal portal — works against the same nouns, calls the same mutations, and shows up in the same audit log.

That's the framing worth internalizing if you're coming from a Terraform-runner model. A runner executes plans and applies on demand; a developer platform lets people request resources the platform team has already defined. The IaC isn't the unit of work — the instance is. Developers ask for a database; the platform team chose, in their bundle, what "database" means in your org. Promotion, forking, deployment, and teardown are platform operations against those instances, not Terraform automations against a workspace.

Two properties make the workflows in this section composable rather than scripted:

  • Primitives are idempotent. forkEnvironment re-fires its seed against an existing fork. setEnvironmentDefault is an upsert. copyInstance deep-merges and stages a plan. deployEnvironment and decommissionEnvironment cancel in-flight rollouts and replace them. Re-running converges; CI doesn't need to checkpoint state.
  • The CLI mirrors the API. Whatever you'd reach for in the UI for a one-off, you can script for the fleet. Whatever you can script, the UI can do too. No "advanced" surface hidden behind support.

Use mass environment preview <ID> -f preview.yaml for the bundled flow, or drive the primitives directly:

mass environment fork ecomm-production pr42 --copy-environment-defaults
mass environment default ecomm-pr42 <shared-vpc-resource-id>
mass instance copy ecomm-production-db --to ecomm-pr42-db --copy-secrets
mass environment deploy ecomm-pr42