Unlock the Power of Automation with Top Infrastructure as Code Tools

Overview of Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools that promote best practices are essential for building and configuring infrastructure efficiently, reducing costs and effort. Before we share the list of the best IaC tools, let’s cover the basics. IaC allows for the automation of infrastructure provisioning and resource management. It enhances cloud infrastructure management, integrates DevOps practices, and supports continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD). Moreover, IaC security ensures compliance by addressing security vulnerabilities, best practice violations, and compliance violations.

Understanding the Concept of Infrastructure as Code

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) configures and manages infrastructure through a descriptive model in the form of a high-level programming language or domain-specific language. It is about treating your infrastructure configuration and provisioning the same way you treat your application source code. The IaC is typically stored in version control systems in a well-documented code format, providing greater accuracy, reducing errors, and increasing speed and consistency. It can also be called a code-based infrastructure automation process.

IaC is one of the most critical DevOps practices used with continuous delivery.

The benefits that lead many businesses to migrate to IaC include:

• Changeless infrastructure

• Increased delivery speed

• Scalability

• Cost savings

• Risk mitigation

IaC allows DevOps teams to use different Infrastructure as Code tools and approaches to automatically control and customize the required infrastructure instead of manually configuring servers and operating systems. With the increase in production and delivery cycles, the use of IaC tools has changed how software engineers design, test, and release their applications.

Why Your Organization Needs Infrastructure as Code Tools

Initially, IT managers had to install servers manually, configure them, and deliver programs. The network teams manually stored and handled the configuration data. This was a time-consuming and tedious process. Furthermore, this endeavor necessitated the collaboration of several people. The most challenging issue was scalability, as administrators struggled to bring up new servers quickly enough to keep up with the speed and scope of changing business operations. Additionally, hiring and managing a team added significantly to the cost.

Challenges in Traditional Infrastructure Management

• Manual Setup: Servers had to be installed and configured manually, which was time-consuming.

• Collaboration Requirement: The process required multiple people to handle different tasks.

• Scalability Issues: Administrators struggled to scale infrastructure fast enough to meet business demands.

• High Costs: Hiring and managing teams for infrastructure management added significant expenses.

Solution with Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud Deployments

• Multi-cloud Deployment: Organizations could mitigate some problems by using multi-cloud and hybrid cloud installations.

• Disparities in Management: Disparities arose when different personnel handled infrastructure management, making it harder to ensure consistency.

Benefits of Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

• Automation of Processes: Scripts could automate some tasks, but maintaining the infrastructure state remained challenging.

• Predefined Configurations: IaC allows administrators to define configurations for IT resources in source code.

• Simplified Infrastructure Management: IaC platforms enable the automation of infrastructure management, ensuring consistency and reducing errors.

Top Infrastructure as Code Tools for 2024

• Terraform  

• AWS CloudFormation  

• OpenTofu

• Ansible  

• Azure Resource Manager 

• Google Cloud Deployment Manager  

• Chef  

• Puppet  

• SaltStack 

• ( R )?ex

Terraform

Terraform is one of the most popular open-source IaC tools for infrastructure automation. It helps configure, provision, and manage Infrastructure as Code. Terraform is one of the successful products of Hashicorp that enabled multi-cloud deployment and Infrastructure as Code frameworks that maintain state as well as configuration. Terraform allows you to easily plan and create IaC across multiple cloud infrastructure providers with the same workflow. It uses a declarative configuration language to define the required infrastructure as code.

Terraform allows users to have a pre-execution check to validate whether the configurations meet the result expectations before updating or provisioning the infrastructure. It enables users to have their desired infrastructure across multiple cloud providers through a single, consistent CLI workflow. You can quickly provision different environments using the same configuration and manage the entire lifecycle of your infrastructure, thus reducing human errors and increasing automation in infrastructure provisioning and management.

OpenTofu 

OpenTofu is a fork of Terraform since Hashicorp decided to change its license. The open-source community did not like the move and decided to fork the project and maintain it under the core open-source license. The Linux Foundation powers it. Since the fork is recent, the features of Terraform and OpenTofu are exactly the same. However, in the future, both projects will evolve according to their respective parent company’s vision. If you want to continue using and supporting open-source software while utilizing Terraform, OpenTofu should be your choice.

Ansible 

RedHat developed Ansible to promote simplicity. It contributes towards IT modernization and helps DevOps teams have faster, more reliable, and coordinated application deployments. You can quickly establish multiple identical environments with security baselines without worrying about compliance requirements. As far as business is concerned, Ansible brings a competitive advantage by providing time for innovation and aligning IT with business needs.

Ansible is considered the simplest way to automate the provision, configuration, and management of applications and IT infrastructure. Ansible enables users to execute playbooks to create and manage the required infrastructure resources. It does not use agents and can connect to servers and run commands over SSH. Its code is written in YAML as Ansible Playbooks, making it easy to understand and deploy configurations. You can even expand the features of Ansible by writing your own Ansible modules and plugins.

AWS CloudFormation 

AWS CloudFormation is an embedded IaC tool within the AWS cloud platform that provides an easy way to quickly and efficiently provision and manage a collection of multiple related AWS and even third-party resources using Infrastructure as Code. It allows you to implement the best practices of DevOps and GitOps. With CloudFormation, you can easily manage the scaling of your resources and automate further resource management by integrating CloudFormation with other required AWS resources.

The models and templates for CloudFormation are written in YAML or JSON format. You just need to code your desired infrastructure from scratch with the suitable template language and use AWS CloudFormation to provision and manage the stack and resources defined in the template. CloudFormation also uses Rollback Triggers to restore infrastructure stacks to a previously deployed state if errors are observed, ensuring deployment and upgrade control.

Creating and managing Google Cloud Platform projects helps organize resources, manage billing, and ensure efficient cloud operations.

Azure Resource Manager

Azure Resource Manager is the service provided for deploying and managing Azure resources. An Azure-specific IaC tool allows resources to be deployed, maintained, and tracked in a single collective action. It incorporates Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to allow users to apply control over access to all resources within a resource category.

Azure Resource Manager allows you to use declarative templates instead of scripts to manage your infrastructure. With Azure Resource Manager, you can quickly redeploy your infrastructure solution multiple times throughout the application development lifecycle, ensuring consistency in the state.

Google Cloud Deployment Manager

Google Cloud Deployment Manager is an infrastructure deployment service provided by GCP to automate the creation, configuration, provisioning, and management of resources on the Google Cloud Platform. You can easily create a set of Google Cloud resources and manage them as a single unit. Using YAML or Python, you can build models, preview changes before deployment, and view deployments in a console user interface.

This Infrastructure as Code tool uses a declarative language approach to specify configurations, letting the system manage the rest. Google Cloud Deployment Manager enables simultaneous deployments of multiple resources, controlling resource creation and defining dependencies. Deployment configurations are treated as code, making deployments repeatable and maintaining consistency in their state.

Chef 

Chef is one of the industry's most notable IaC tools. Chef uses procedural language where the user specifies how to achieve the desired state. It relies on the user to determine an optimal deployment process. Using its Ruby-based DSL, Chef allows you to create recipes and cookbooks, specifying the exact steps required to configure your applications and utilities on servers.

Chef focuses on deploying and modeling a scalable, secure infrastructure automation process across any environment. With Chef, DevOps teams can provision and deploy on-demand infrastructure with ease. Chef is commonly used in configuration management solutions for continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD).

Puppet 

Puppet is another open-source configuration management tool that is used to manage multiple application servers simultaneously. It also uses a Ruby-based DSL like Chef, where you describe your infrastructure's desired end state. The primary difference between Puppet and Chef is that Puppet uses a declarative approach, where you define what configurations you want, and Puppet determines how to achieve them.

Puppet refers to a set of IaC tools used to deliver your infrastructures quickly and securely at scale. It integrates with leading cloud infrastructure management platforms like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and VMware, enabling multi-cloud deployment.

SaltStack 

SaltStack is an open-source configuration management tool based on Python that offers a simple solution for provisioning, deploying, and configuring infrastructure at high speed. SaltStack focuses on infrastructure, security, and network automation. It is useful for mitigation and remediation of common infrastructure issues.

SaltStack is a cost-efficient IaC solution that automates orchestration, reducing manual effort. It can automatically detect problems with event triggers and return to the desired state when needed. SaltStack also supports SSH in agentless mode, and its scheduler allows you to specify how often managed servers should run your code.

( R )?ex 

(R)?ex or Rex is an easy-to-use automation framework that doesn’t enforce any model of its own. With Rex, you can choose any combination of declarative or imperative approaches, push or pull management styles, and local or remote execution. It is an open-source deployment and configuration management platform built on Perl that allows seamless extension of modules.

Rex uses SSH support to control remote hosts and helps automate repeatable tasks, saving time and reducing human effort.

Key Approaches for Writing Infrastructure as Code

There are two main approaches for writing Infrastructure as Code (IaC):

1. Declarative (Functional) Approach: The declarative approach defines the desired state of the target, i.e., what the target's actual configuration should be. The steps to set up a server are not defined. Instead, the list of requirements or third-party software needed to set up the infrastructure is defined. IaC tools like Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, and Azure Resource Manager use this approach.
2. Imperative (Procedural) Approach: The imperative approach defines the commands that must be executed to achieve the desired result. It focuses on changing the infrastructure to meet the desired result, specifying the exact steps. Configuration management tools like Chef, Puppet, and Ansible typically follow this approach.

How to Choose the Right IaC Tool

There are different Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools because not all tasks can be performed by the same tool. The tools are generally categorized into three main categories:

1. Infrastructure provisioning

2. Configuration of provisioned infrastructure

3. Application deployment

Phases in Which They Automate Tasks

1. Initial Setup phase

2. Maintaining phase

Categories Based on "How They Work"

1. Declarative or Imperative
2. Mutable or Immutable
3. Agent or Agentless
4. State and Stateless
5. Cloud-Specific vs Cloud-Agnostic

We have several tools available to automate infrastructure, categorized based on their tasks. Now, let us understand when to choose which IaC tools based on best practices.

For configuration Management vs. Provisioning 

• Ansible, Chef, Puppet, and SaltStack are configuration management tools to install and configure applications on existing infrastructure.

• Terraform and AWS CloudFormation are infrastructure provisioning tools used to provision servers and other infrastructure like load balancers, databases, and network configuration.

• Some tools, like Terraform, can perform both infrastructure provisioning and application deployment.

For Mutable Infrastructure vs. Immutable Infrastructure 

• Chef, Puppet, Ansible, and SaltStack are mutable infrastructure tools. If you configure these tools to install a new version of the software, they will update the existing servers.

• Terraform (an immutable IaC tool) requires a new server deployment for every "change."

For Procedural vs. Declarative 

• Chef and Ansible follow the procedural approach, where you must write code that specifies step-by-step instructions to achieve the target state.

• Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, SaltStack, and Puppet use a declarative method, where you define the target state, and the IaC tool figures out how to reach it.

For Agent vs. Agentless 

• Chef, Puppet, and SaltStack are agent-based tools that require the installation of an agent on the target system to perform operations.

• Ansible, AWS CloudFormation, and Terraform are agentless tools, meaning no agents are required for automation.

• If you are starting with IaC, using agentless configuration tools is highly recommended.

For Provisioning and Configuration Management 

• Ansible and Terraform are tools that can perform both provisioning and configuration management.

• Terraform can provision infrastructure (servers, databases, load balancers), while Ansible can deploy applications on top of these infrastructures.

State and Stateless 

• Some IaC tools like Puppet and Chef manage the state of the infrastructure and continuously check the state.

• Other tools, like Ansible, work more like a fire-and-forget script (Python or Bash).

• Terraform is a hybrid tool, agentless and manages the infrastructure state in a file, checking the previous state on each run. It works well in fully automated ecosystems but may cause infrastructure drift with manual intervention.

Cloud Specific and Cloud Agnostic 

• All major cloud providers offer their own IaC frameworks (e.g., AWS CloudFormation). Investing in a cloud-specific IaC framework is recommended if your organization does not use on-premises or hybrid infrastructure or does not plan to in the near future.

• You can also opt for a cloud-agnostic IaC framework for broader flexibility, though a cloud-specific tool often offers better support for the latest features and products in its ecosystem.

Key Takeaways on Implementing Infrastructure as Code Tools

We believe that Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the future of computing resource provisioning and management. While it comes with its own set of implementation challenges, the long-term benefits it delivers far outweigh the hurdles it currently faces. IaC greatly benefits IT and DevOps teams by improving consistency, speed, and scalability in infrastructure management.

IaC tools are critical in making this implementation possible. The list provided above highlights some of the top IaC tools available in the market today. While this list is not exhaustive, it serves as a solid starting point for those looking to explore the field of infrastructure automation and cloud infrastructure management.