As a software consulting business, we want to use open source to record, maintain and share our standard approaches to various technology stacks and techniques supporting disciplined iterative and incremental software engineering. Any time we work with a new customer, we learn something new, and that new knowledge will make it to one or more of our open-source starter projects. Right now, we have such projects for technologies such as Next.js and Terraform and plan to continue expanding these and adding more in the future.  

Infrastructure as code (IaC) has become an integral part of the modern state of the art software engineering toolset. IaC helps in reducing human error by eliminating manual processes and giving a development team the ability to deploy large, robust cloud infrastructures quickly and efficiently. At Caravel Labs, we consider IaC a core capability of each our engineering teams and a high priority requirement for every project we work on. We aim to have IaC configured for a new project within the first development sprint. 

After successfully completing several projects for our customers implementing IaC solutions from the very first sprint, we have released the terraform-azure-starter repo. This open-source project is focused on deploying the necessary infrastructure for a NodeJS Web App running in Azure with a Cosmos DB database instance. Please check it out, whether you are already familiar with Terraform or are just getting into IaC, we are sure you will find something of value! 

Another Caravel Labs open-source project is our nextjs-starter repo. Many of our recent customer projects have required a web application so we have been looking for strong open-source frameworks and tools that support robust and scalable web-apps. We have found Next.js meets our quality standards and requirements in terms of getting us much closer to production readiness faster. This stack also uses quite comprehensive Material UI framework. We also love TypeScript, so all our projects support it.  

We will continue updating these open-source projects because as we mentioned before, we use these as well in our projects and as a company have made a commitment to contribute to open-source. We are also open to your feedback and contributions so please contact us if you are interested in contributing or want to know about our services!