“Greenfield” vs “Brownfield” Projects In IaaC
According to many authors, software architectures come from two different types of projects. In the first place, there are the “Greenfield” projects. Which are brand new projects; this means the software engineering team starts implementing the architecture without any antecedent. Then, there are the “Brownfield” projects. These are projects that already have a history. The architecture was thought differently and the implementations follow accordingly. Brownfield’s meaning is that the team needs to figure out how to transition to the new architecture. In summary, there is no need to start from scratch, but the challenge is to switch to the desired architecture.
My experience in infrastructure is analogous to what I’ve mentioned in the previous paragraph. There are projects that start with IaaC and others that don’t. On one hand, Greenfield projects use IaaC, the team has the required coding skills, and a CI/CD like workflow is already implemented; at least partially. On the other hand, Brownfield projects require many extra steps and involve more complexity. The migration requires time for adoption and a well thought and planned pipeline. In this article, I’ll sum up my experience with a Brownfield project in IaaC.