I am intrigued by the spreadsheet to control infrastructure bit.
> the engineers responsible for it elected to use spreadsheets to control the infrastructure
Can you explain what this means, how would you control infra through spreadsheets? Is it something like terraform... You change a '1' to a '2' in a particular cell and some script queries that XLSX and notice the change and create a new EC2?
Not OP, but shokingly, what you describe _does_ exist. Or at least something similar for managing kubernetes. [0]
In my own experience, I at least once found one slack app that was configured throught spreadsheet. [1] It actually worked quite well.
Although in this context, I assume that by "infrastructure", OP was probably refering to the whole configuration of some Microsoft tools (PowerBI). I don't think it was about provisionning infrastructure. But I'm not familiar with PowerBI so it's only my guess.
I would also love to hear more about InfrastructureAsSpreadsheet, if anyone have fun or horror stories to share :)
I can't go into a lot of detail for reasons of anonymity, but suffice it to say, this involves handing out spreadsheets to stakeholders, uploading them to Git repositories, then performing some truly unholy rites to create stuff in AWS and a database.
The gist of what you suggested is basically right though.
> the engineers responsible for it elected to use spreadsheets to control the infrastructure
Can you explain what this means, how would you control infra through spreadsheets? Is it something like terraform... You change a '1' to a '2' in a particular cell and some script queries that XLSX and notice the change and create a new EC2?