Infrastructure as a Code (IaaC) refers to the delivery and management of infrastructure through high-level descriptive code compared to the manual process.
Organizations must automate infrastructure to control costs, lower risks, and react quickly to new business opportunities and competitive threats. Infrastructure is constantly being spun up, torn down, and scaled up and down in response to developer and user demands. This automation is made feasible via IaaC.
The provisioning of IT infrastructure is automated using Infrastructure as Code (IaaC), which uses a high-level descriptive coding language. Thanks to this automation, developers no longer have to manually provision and manage servers, operating systems, database connections, storage, and other infrastructure components each time they wish to create, test, or deploy a software application.
IaaC is an essential DevOps approach vital to the fast-paced lifecycle of software delivery. It facilitates the ability for DevOps teams to quickly generate and version infrastructure in the same way they create source code. In addition to tracking these versions to prevent inconsistency between IT environments, which can cause significant problems with deployment.
IaaC makes it simpler to change and distribute configurations by generating configuration files that contain your infrastructure specifications. Additionally, it guarantees that you always provide the same environment. IaaC facilitates configuration management and enables you to prevent ad hoc, undocumented configuration changes by codifying and documenting your configuration standards.
By using well-documented code in formats like JSON to represent intended environment states, IaaC minimizes manual configuration and upholds consistency. IaaC enables repeatable infrastructure installations that avoid runtime problems brought on by incorrect configuration changes or missing dependencies. Target environments are configured by release pipelines using version configuration models and environment descriptions. The team modifies the source rather than the target while making modifications.
Infrastructure provisioning has always been a labor-intensive and expensive manual operation. Although physical hardware in data centers may still be a part of infrastructure management today, virtualization, containers, and cloud computing have taken their place.
The number of infrastructure components has increased due to cloud computing, more apps are being launched into production every day, and infrastructure needs to be quickly scaled. The size of today’s infrastructure is getting harder to manage without an IaaC approach.
IaaC can assist your business in managing its requirements for IT infrastructure while enhancing consistency, lowering error rates, and eliminating human configuration.
The benefits are exactly what you might imagine:
Reduced costs and increased ROI
In addition to drastically lowering the time, effort, and specialized skill needed to provide and grow infrastructure, IaaC enables businesses to leverage the consumption-based pricing model of cloud computing fully. Additionally, it frees developers’ time to work on creative, crucial software solutions rather than plumbing.
Faster and more effective development
IaaC can securely expedite each stage of the software delivery lifecycle by streamlining provisioning and guaranteeing infrastructure consistency.
Faster time to production
IaaC automation significantly accelerates the provisioning of infrastructure for development, testing, and production, resulting in a shorter time to market (and for scaling or taking down production infrastructure as needed). IaaC can even automate the provisioning of old infrastructure, which time-consuming processes would otherwise govern because it codifies and documents everything (like pulling a ticket).
Protection against churn
In firms without IaaC, provisioning is often assigned to a small number of qualified engineers or IT staffers to maximize efficiency. In other cases, the procedure must be rebuilt if one of these specialists departs the company. IaaC guarantees that the organization always owns the provisioning intelligence.
Improved consistency—less ‘configuration drift’
Configuration drift happens when automatic configuration updates and modifications lead to uneven development, testing, and deployment environments. This may lead to deployment problems, security holes, and vulnerabilities when creating applications and services that must adhere to high regulatory compliance criteria. IaaC prevents drift by provisioning the same environment every time.
Terraform by HashiCorp is the leading IaaC tool that manages infrastructure across various platforms from AWS, Azure, and GCP to Oracle Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, and Kubernetes. Engineers can automate the provisioning of all aspects of their enterprise cloud-based and on-premises infrastructure using Terraform.
Terraform maintains the lifespan of your infrastructure and allows you to describe resources and infrastructure in declarative configuration files that are readable by humans. Using Terraform to manage your infrastructure provides several benefits over doing it manually:
Terraform plugins called providers let Terraform interact with cloud platforms and other services via their application programming interfaces (APIs). To manage resources on platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Kubernetes HashiCorp and the Terraform community have created over 1,000 providers.
Terraform’s configuration language is declarative, describing the intended end-state for your infrastructure. Providers of Terraform automatically determine resource dependencies so that resources are created or destroyed in the proper sequence.
To deploy infrastructure with Terraform:
A state file maintained by Terraform serves as the environment’s single source of truth and records information about your existing infrastructure. Terraform analyses the state file to decide what modifications need to be made to your infrastructure to comply with your setup.
Terraform’s remote state backends enable collaboration on your infrastructure. You may safely share your state with your team members when you use Terraform Cloud and provide a stable environment for Terraform to function in and avoid race situations when many individuals make configuration changes at once.
Infrastructure as code is a fundamental idea in IT that enables infrastructure managers to deliver resources quickly and easily, establish security, and alter the landscape from any place. Today, almost all cloud environments, including AWS, Google, and Microsoft Azure, enable IaaC through their resource management interfaces.
Professionals at ABC have the expertise to deploy IaaC-based infrastructure on AWS, Azure, and VMware using Terraform. You can fully manage your Terraform-based infrastructure automation with ABC so that you can focus more on developing apps and less on creating environments. To learn more, visit us.
Platform as a Service is a cloud development and deployment environment with the resources organizations need to deliver anything from basic cloud-based apps to complex enterprise applications.
A hybrid cloud is a type of cloud computing environment that combines public and private cloud resources. The primary benefit of this type of configuration is the ability to provide access to the services of both public and private.
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