Infrastructure as Code

As speed becomes a determinant of a business’ competitiveness, DevOps journey has a great role for your success. At its simplest, DevOps will increase your organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at higher velocity. This enables your organization to be more responsive to the ever-increasing customer wants and needs. Treating your infrastructure as code and adopting its principles is an important step on your DevOps journey.

What is Infrastructure as Code?

So, what is Infrastructure as Code and why do you need it? Infrastructure as Code (“IaC” for short), is simply the process of managing and provisioning resources like networks, load balancers, instances and any other components as services that your application needs through written codes, rather than interactive configuration tools. Using interactive tools and management consoles to manage such complicated environments has now become inconvenient. Creating complex infrastructures and ensuring everything is configured as it should may take days or even weeks. And yet, it would still be much vulnerable to human errors.

Here are the main advantages of adapting infrastructure as code for your organization:

Structure: You can standardize the configuration of your environments in a written way. You can easily iterate your infrastructure and maintain it. You can keep versions of your infrastructure and follow the changes through time.

Health: Since your infrastructure will be coded and will have the same development life-cycle as your application codes such as peer-reviews, human errors on changes can be minimised.

Speed: As the needed manual effort for changes decreases, it becomes easier to distribute these changes across all your infrastructure.

Security: Infrastructure as Code enables you to implement security practices for your infrastructure and adapt them easily. Continuous security and compliance is only possible through automation. In addition, it allows your team to use their time to work on things that can’t be automated—such as developing security strategy. With Infrastructure as Code, it becomes much easier to standardize, implement and adapt security practices for your infrastructure. The automation helps to reduce the security risks associated with human error and prevent runtime issues caused by configuration drift.

As business needs change rapidly today, you should step up your game towards dynamism. Infrastructure as Code helps you to be more agile and accelerates your processes.

How to implement Infrastructure as Code?

To start implementing Infrastructure as Code in your organization, you should complete these basic steps:

• See your infrastructure as code just like your application.

• Start using a source control service such as Git or TFS to store and maintain your infrastructure codes.

• Define the standards for your infrastructure and environments.

• Design your infrastructure in such a way that you can easily redeploy and reuse.

• Embrace end-to-end automation for your organization and try to get rid of time consuming and effortful manual tasks.

• Add your infrastructure changes to development sprints and life-cycle.

You can see the built in programmatic interfaces in every service the cloud vendors provide. These programmatic interfaces are offered to ensure you can maintain them as codes.

For further information, you can check the following links:

• AWS Cloudformation: https://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/

• Google Cloud Deployment Manager: https://cloud.google.com/deployment-manager/

• Microsoft Azure Resource Manager: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/features/resource-manager/

Last but not the least, you can use Terraform which supports various Cloud providers including those above and many others: https://www.terraform.io