Streamlining Team Onboarding and Offboarding Processes

Question

Pulumi · Accepted Answer

Streamlining team onboarding and offboarding processes can be quite a logistical challenge, particularly as teams grow and change over time. Automating these tasks can help to ensure they are handled consistently, and can free up valuable time for your team to focus on other tasks.

Pulumi is an infrastructure as code tool that you can use to programmatically manage group memberships and access control within various services like GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps, and others. This allows you to define your team's infrastructure in code and apply changes consistently, quickly, and safely.

Let's look at how you might use Pulumi to manage team onboarding and offboarding within Azure DevOps since it's a common platform for software development.

In this illustrative example, we're going to set up a new team within a project on Azure DevOps, and then manage the team membership programmatically. This could be part of an onboarding process, where new team members are added to the project's team. For offboarding, it could be a case of removing the user's membership.

This program in Python assumes you have already set up Pulumi with Azure DevOps provider and have necessary permissions to manage teams and users.

First, let's write a Pulumi program that defines an Azure DevOps project and a team within that project:

```python
import pulumi
import pulumi_azuredevops as azuredevops

# Create a new Azure DevOps project
project = azuredevops.Project("example-project", 
    work_item_template="Agile", 
    version_control="Git", 
    description="An example project")

# Define a new team within the Azure DevOps project
team = azuredevops.Team("example-team", 
    project_id=project.id,
    description="An example team within the example project")

# Export the project name
pulumi.export("project_name", project.name)

# Export the team name
pulumi.export("team_name", team.name)
```
With the above code, you define the infrastructure for managing a project and a team within Azure DevOps as code. What you've effectively told Pulumi to do is to make sure there is a project called `example-project` and within that project, there is a team called `example-team`.

Now, let's manage team members. To add or remove members from a team, you can define the `azuredevops.GroupMembership` resource. You have to explicitly declare which identities should be part of your team:

```python
# Specify the members to be part of the team
team_member = azuredevops.GroupMembership("example-team-member", 
    group=team.id,
    members=["user_id_1", "user_id_2"])

# Export the team's member list
pulumi.export("team_members", team_member.members)
```

Assuming that `user_id_1` and `user_id_2` are actual user identifiers within Azure DevOps, the above code will make sure that these users are part of your team.

In a real world scenario, the user IDs would be dynamically retrieved from a database, an Excel file, or an HR system where your employee data resides. The onboarding process might trigger an Azure Function or AWS Lambda that executes the Pulumi script to add the new team member. Similarly for offboarding, when an employee leaves, this data can trigger a function to remove the user from all the necessary teams and projects.

Automating these processes reduces manual effort and ensures consistent execution of onboarding and offboarding tasks, which helps maintain the security and integrity of your project environments.

Keep in mind that in this scenario, you would also want to handle offboarding, which would involve removing the users' group memberships. This can be managed by simply not including the user in the `members` list of the `GroupMembership` resource definition. When Pulumi applies the change, the user will be removed from the team.

This approach to infrastructure as code for team management is an example of how Pulumi enables teams to manage cloud resources — and more — with real programming languages and the full power of software development practices.