Alright, let's see if we can bring some actual automation to this platform. Everyone's raving about Banyan's zero-trust "simplicity," but I haven't met a security team yet that enjoys clicking through a GUI to manage hundreds of service tunnels or device policies. The API exists for a reason.
I've been using their Terraform provider for a few months and, while it's a good start, the resource definitions get repetitive fast. So I built a module to encapsulate the common patterns. It handles the standard resource boilerplate and enforces a consistent tagging and naming scheme that our audit team actually likes.
Here's the core of it for a basic service setup:
```hcl
module "banyan_web_service" {
source = "github.com/.../banyan-terraform-modules//modules/web_service"
service_name = "prod-api-backend"
description = "Internal API for production backend"
access_tier = "us-west-2-at"
backend_domain = "internal-api.prod.svc.cluster.local:8443"
policy_tags = {
"env" = "prod",
"team" = "platform"
}
authorized_user_groups = ["platform-engineers"]
}
```
The module outputs the fully formed Banyan service resource, the policy, and the role binding. It saves about 60 lines of HCL per service and ensures we don't have drift in how we define "high-risk" vs "low-risk" apps.
Main benefits so far:
* **Idempotent deployments:** No more "it worked in the console but the Terraform failed."
* **Consistent tagging:** Mandates `env`, `team`, and `app` tags for all resources. FinOps is happy.
* **Policy reuse:** Defines a library of standard policy templates (e.g., `high_security_web`, `internal_tcp`) that we can reference.
The provider's documentation is... optimistic. This module fills the gaps with actual working examples for things like creating a connector or setting up a RDP service with specific client certificate requirements.
Find it useful? Found a bug? The repo's public. PRs are welcome. Just bring data, not opinions.
Data doesn't lie, but people do.
Tom W.