Infrastructure as Code (IaC) automates most of the provisioning work in software development. It is becoming the norm for companies that seek faster delivery.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. Infrastructure is one of the core tenets of a software development process — it is directly responsible for the stable operation of a software application. This infrastructure can range from servers, load balancers, firewalls, and databases all the way to complex container clusters. Infrastructure considerations are valid beyond production environments, as they spread across the entire development process. They include tools and platforms such as CI/CD platforms, staging environments, and testing tools. These infrastructure considerations increase as the level of complexity of the software product increases. Very quickly, the traditional approach for manually managing infrastructure becomes an unscalable solution to meet the demands of DevOps modern rapid software development cycles. And that’s how Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has become the de facto solution in development today. Infrastructure as Code is the process of provisioning and managing infrastructure defined through code, instead of doing so with a manual process. IaC takes away the majority of provisioning work from developers, who can execute a script to have their infrastructure ready to go. That way, application deployments aren’t held up waiting for the infrastructure, and sysadmins aren’t managing time-consuming manual processes. Here is a step-by-step explanation of how creating an IaC environment works: With Infrastructure as Code, users don’t need to configure an environment every time they want to develop, test, or deploy software. All infrastructure parameters are saved in the form of files called manifests. As all code files, manifests are easy to reuse, edit, copy, and share. Manifests make building, testing, staging, and deploying infrastructure quicker and more consistent. Developers codify the configuration files and store them in version control. If someone edits a file, pull requests and code review workflows can check the correctness of the changes. Infrastructure automation implementation will require numerous changes and refactoring, so this may be a pretty strenuous process for your organization. If you want to avoid most of the constraints and make the transition less severe, follow the best practices below! This will help you to maintain the good quality of the code and get fast feedback loops from your DevOps teammates or developers (after the changes were applied). Luckily, there are test frameworks like Terratest for Terraform that allow us to write the actual tests. The earlier you try to cover everything with it, the more you benefit from it and fewer unexpected problems will happen with infrastructure. To be sure, you can’t anticipate application errors here, but at least you can be more confident in your infrastructure. Microservices architecture, in which software is built by developing smaller, modular units of code that can be deployed independently of the rest of a product’s components, is a popular trend in software development. The same concept can be applied to IaC. You can break down your infrastructure into separate modules or stack and combine them in an automated fashion. There are a few benefits to this approach. First, you can have greater control over who has access to which parts of your infrastructure code. For example, you may have junior engineers who aren’t familiar with or don’t have expertise in certain parts of your infrastructure configuration. By modularizing your infrastructure code, you can deny access to these components until the junior engineers get up to speed. Also, modular infrastructure naturally limits the number of changes that can be made to the configuration. Smaller changes make bugs easier to detect and allow your team to be more agile. And if you’re using IaC to support a microservices architecture, a configuration template should be used to ensure consistency as your infrastructure scales to become a large cluster of servers. This will eventually be highly valuable for configuring the servers and specifying how they should interact. Continuous testing, integration, and deployment processes are a great way to manage all the changes that may be made to your infrastructure code.
