The world of technology is constantly shifting. Right now, we are living in what might be peak container and cloud adoption. Those two technologies alone have changed the entire landscape of business. At the same time, cloud and containerization have made business tech exponentially more complicated. The deployment and management of containers and hybrid clouds isn’t exactly a task for junior-level admins.
In fact, most container and cloud deployments require entire teams to keep them up and running. That’s how complex the systems are. Because of that, there’s always a push to do anything possible to simplify the deployment and management of those platforms.
It’s not easy.
Those two technologies have also spawned a lot of acronyms in the industry, one of which is somewhat confusing at first blush. Without explanation, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) seems a bit backward. How can infrastructure be thought of in terms of code? Well, it all lies in the explanation.
What Is IaC?
The first question we must ask is, what is IaC? Simply put, IaC is everything necessary to create an environment conducive to running an application. By “everything,” we mean things like servers, configurations, networking, databases, storage, versioning, automated testing, CI/CD, and local development.
IaC depends on the DevOps methodology as a guide for deploying networks, virtual machines, containers, load balancing, and fail over in such a way that, with everything taken together, you have a complete environment with which to deploy apps and services.
One of the most important aspects of IaC is repeatability. The goal is to be able to spin up an environment quickly over and over again. By using this approach, you can reliably and easily deploy these environments for either development or production purposes.
But again, we’re back to asking the question, how can “servers” be code? Here’s an easy example most admins and DevOps members can understand. Have you ever deployed a virtual machine or container? From either the virtual machine (VM) or container, you can then add various environments (e.g., development frameworks, automation tools, versioning, software repositories) such that you are able to develop within the VM. Even better, you could create a VM, install everything you need to use on that VM (such as libraries, frameworks, languages, app stacks, servers, and databases) and then (once the VM is exactly how you want it) clone it every time you need.
No Manual Configuration Necessary
Not only does IaC focus on repeatability, but it also goes a long way to avoid manual configuration. Imagine, if you will, you could configure the state of every aspect of an environment in a single JSON file and then spin up that environment with a single command. By doing this, you avoid the time-consuming task of configuring an environment every time you need it and avoid things like configuration drift (when a system’s actual state drifts from the original intended state) or missing dependencies.
The amount of time IaC can save your DevOps team can be considerable. Although it will require quite a bit of time upfront (to get acclimated to the technology), the time your admins, developers, and operations managers will save can be immeasurable in importance. With all of that extra time back, those team members can be off doing other crucial tasks (instead of building environments to deploy).
Automation, Automation, Automation
Another aspect of IaC is automation. Once you have your infrastructure configured in a JSON file and ready to deploy, you could automate it such that every time X task completes, a new environment is automatically deployed.
Even better, with the help of CI/CD, you could eventually automate the creation of the environment from a single source of truth in a software repository like GitHub. With all of your configuration files in that repository, the automation systems would read the configurations and automatically deploy the new environment based on the contents of one or more JSON files.
Once again, you’ve made your pipeline more efficient, repeatable, and reliable. One of the more exciting aspects of automation is removing human error. As long as your source of truth is correctly configured, there’s no chance that an automation platform will incorrectly deploy the infrastructure needed.
The Pros of IaC
IaC has a number of important benefits every business could use:
Confidence
With IaC in place, your DevOps teams will enjoy a boost in confidence. Given everyone involved knows that each time an environment is deployed it will be correct means those team members won’t have to spend any time troubleshooting the deployed infrastructure. It will just work.
Speed
IaC is much faster at provisioning environments than a human could ever achieve. And given the addition of automation, there’s simply no comparing the two.
Reproducibility
Once your JSON configurations are correct, you can rest assured your infrastructure will reproduce in the same way every time.
No Need to Document
Because IaC works from a single source of truth, all of the documentation you need will be found in your GitHub repository.
Logs and Observability
With IaC, you can easily build in logs and observability such that you always know what has happened, what is happening, and what will happen. With that kind of data in hand, you’ll be better capable of tweaking and improving the environments and/or predicting when trouble arises.
Easier Testing/Debugging
One very handy feature of IaC is that it makes it easy to test and debug your infrastructure. This is far easier than testing/debugging traditional infrastructure, which could require extensive hardware, software, and network testing.
Consistency
With IaC, you always know a new environment will not only spin up properly but will always work. You cannot achieve that level of consistency (especially at scale or speed) using traditional infrastructure.
Automation
Yes, you can automate the provisioning of hardware with the likes of Ansible but automating the rollout of an entire environment on traditional infrastructure can be a serious challenge. With IaC you can automate every aspect of the deployment to help lighten the load of your DevOps teams and make your business function far more seamlessly.
Secrets Management
Your environments will require secrets, such as passwords, API tokens, and certificates. Managing those items with traditional hardware is not only complicated but can also lead to security issues. With the help of IaC and various pieces of the stack, you can more easily control those secrets such that they are encrypted and less likely to be used against you.
The Cons of IaC
Although IaC can be a real boon to your company, it’s not perfect. Here are a few negatives to the technology:
Complexities
Once you have IaC up and running as required, things can be very simple. However, getting to that point can be rather complicated. Not only can there be a number of moving pieces to your infrastructure stack, those pieces can be very challenging to master. Because of that, you’ll want to make sure your DevOps team has plenty of lead time to get up to speed with the technology.
A Lot of Code
Depending on how complicated or large your IaC stack is, there can be an exorbitant amount of code involved. That means you’ll need to have an efficient means of managing that code. For that, you’ll want to employ the likes of GitHub and have team members fluent in the platform.
Code Complexity
Much of the code used in IaC can be fairly complicated. On top of which, you’ll probably have members of your DevOps team having to inspect or change code they didn’t write. That means they’ll require time to get up to speed on that code. This is especially true if your company has a high turnover rate.
The Speed
The speed at which IaC works is impressive, especially once you have everything automated. Although that is a big plus, it can sometimes be seen as a minus. There will be the occasional issue that arises, and trying to stop an environment before it’s deployed can be challenging simply because IaC automation works exponentially faster than a human. Because of that, you’ll need to ensure there are fail-safes in your code that make it easy to pause deployments so your DevOps teams can fix any issues.
At the same time, if you have an IaC stack that is deployed to multiple locations (such as across the globe), when you discover an issue, the automation will have already deployed it. That can require a lot of rolling back and troubleshooting. And given how fast IaC works, your teams will have to be hyper-vigilant about discovering and fixing issues.
Conclusion
Infrastructure as Code isn’t just a buzzword, it’s a way for your company to work more reliably, efficiently, and repeatedly. With the right level of automation, your DevOps teams can work with a system that makes their job exponentially easier, which will, in turn, make your business more profitable.
What business wouldn’t benefit from that?
And if your company doesn’t have the staff to pull off IaC, you can always turn to BairesDev, who will put together the perfect team to help you get IaC up and running.
If you enjoyed this, be sure to check out our other DevOps articles.
