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Infrastructure as Code
An ultimate beginner's guide to IaC!
Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) is a very important concept to understand in the DevOps world today. It has become almost ubiquitous across the industry and is absolutely key to modern engineering roles.
In this post, I will explain what IaC is, what its benefits are, some of the tooling options available, and point out some best practices along the way. I will then look at some code examples for each tool to compare and contrast.
What is Infrastructure-as-code?
Put in the simplest terms, using code, you define the infrastructure that needs to be deployed in a descriptive model. Similar to code for applications, the code for the infrastructure becomes part of the project and is stored inside your version control system (or VCS).
For example, consider that you have developed a web application. That web application needs to be hosted on infrastructure somewhere to be consumed. Using IaC you could define things like where the infrastructure is deployed to, such as a public cloud provider like Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, or Google Cloud, and what type of service your web application will run on, such as an Azure web app, or an AWS S3 Storage account. Further to this, you can then define the settings required for the web app, which might include things like how much server compute power is required (in terms of CPU and memory), how the networking is secured, and how the domain name for your app will be exposed, to name a few among many other considerations.
What are the benefits of Infrastructure-as-code?
IaC solves many common problems with provisioning Infrastructure.
- New environments or infrastructure can be provisioned easily from your IaC configuration code. Infrastructure deployments with IaC are repeatable.
- Manually configured environments are difficult to scale. With environments provisioned using IaC, they can be deployed and scaled rapidly.
- If you want to make changes to the existing infrastructure that has been deployed with IaC, this can be done in code, and the changes will be tracked.
- When IaC is used with a…
