Define all your IT infrastructure as Code instead of creating it manually. So that Infrastructure resources can be easily re-created or replicated. Managing IT infrastructure might be a hard job in the past but not now. In the past, system administrators have to manually manage and configure all of the hardware and software that was needed for the applications to run. They document all these procedures in a standard document template and keep them in the document repositories. But it’s very hard to keep the documentation update to date, hard to test and review those procedures.
What is Infrastructure as Code?
In the new era, things have changed dramatically due to cloud computing revolutions, API based communications, new innovative tools sets, the way organizations design and develop new applications. “Infrastructure as code” is the process of managing and provisioning computer objects through machine-readable definition files, rather than manually following the document procedures or using interactive configuration tools.
X as Code
“Infrastructure as Code” has been evolved to “Network as Code”, “Policy as Code”, “Configuration as Code” etc.. So it’s no longer restricted to just infrastructure. The same method can be taken to wherever configurations are required and need to be managed. “X as Code” is nothing but a unified infrastructure, network, security, configuration as code etc..
Challenges of Managing IT Infrastructure
Most of the organizations were managing IT infrastructure manually even as of today. Companies are hiring many professionals to install and configure the servers, applications etc… People come with a cost and it increases the management overhead. With a larger team, communication often being a big challenge. Inevitably, this manual process would often result in several problems. Some of the organization have heavily invested to develop in-house automation solutions but those are very complex and difficult to operate and integrate with multiple tools.
The next big challenge is dealing with life cycle management and keep the configuration consistent across the environment. If people are manually implementing configurations, discrepancies aren’t going to be unavoidable.
Infrastructure as Code Benefits
Here are the some of the benefits your organization will reap by adopting an IaC solutions.
Speed: IaC provides speeds up infrastructure deployment. You can refer to the common code with environment variables to deploy from development to production, passing through staging, QA, and more.
Consistency: Human makes mistakes and difficult retain same set of members all the time to do the certain tasks. Manual infrastructure management will result in discrepancies, no matter how hard you try and place governance. IaC solves that problem by having the config files themselves be the single source of truth. That way, you guarantee the same configurations will be deployed over and over, without discrepancies.
Cost: IaC drastically reduces the cost of infrastructure management. In this digital era, it’s a big crime if every time you have high-paid professionals performing tasks that you could automate. All high-paid professionals focus should be on tasks that bring more value to the organization rather than focusing on the tasks which can be done automated. .
Using IaC solutions, You can build the environment on Cloud in few hours and tear it down in a few minutes. Whereas if you have done it manually, it would take few weeks to set up the environment and will take another week to clean up.
IaC strategy – Best Practices
- Code should be the single source of truth.
- Using version control for all of your configurations and IaC. (Github, GitLab etc…)
- Less effort on documentation since code will be the single source of truth. External documentation can easily get out of sync with the real configurations. (Use source control repositories for documentation along with code )
- Test and Monitor Your Configurations. Explore more on automated testing to reduce manual efforts.
Can “Infrastructure as code” strategy solve all the issues on the Infrastructure management ? Certainly not. This is where need GitOps to address some of flaws of IaC. We will see GitOps briefly in next article.