Torque Blueprint Automation Best Practices Guide

This guide provides best practices for building Torque blueprints that utilize Ansible, Terraform, and Shell grains. The objective is to establish a consistent, reusable, and testable automation library that can scale from individual developer environments to production deployments. The guide emphasizes an Ansible-first philosophy, recommending Ansible for both infrastructure provisioning and configuration management, while suggesting Terraform for cloud-native stateful resources. It outlines core principles for grain design, including the use of dynamic inventory management and layered granularity. The document also details repository structure standards, key structural rules, and the design philosophy behind grains. It presents best practices for Ansible grains, including playbook structure, requirements files, and exporting outputs. Furthermore, it discusses the lifecycle management capabilities of Ansible grains, particularly the importance of the on-destroy section for resource cleanup. Overall, the guide serves as a comprehensive resource for developers and engineers working with Torque.