Infrastructure as Code Best Practices and Benefits

Infrastructure as Code is a higher-level abstraction used to write code/log in to a high-level language that utilizes modules to perform tasks on the machine level. Infrastructure as Code involves code to provision, configure, and manage infrastructure. Use the right set of tools to describe the infrastructure on which the application deploys. It includes the specification of Virtual Machines, Storage, Software Stacks, Network Configurations, Security features, User Accounts, Access Control Limits, and so on. The description is done using the code in the declarative language, depending on the tools, using standard scripting languages to use Domain-Specific Languages (DSL) provided by the tools.

This approach is integral to Infrastructure Automation and ensures scalability in IT infrastructure while helping with automated provisioning and version control in infrastructure.

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IAC has the following characteristics -

• The standard syntax for consistency across configurations.
• Uses built-in packages for seamless integration with other tools and services.
• Provides better configuration management, ensuring infrastructure consistency.
• Version controlled, allowing for tracking and rollback of changes.
• Ability to roll back to the previous state if things don’t work, ensuring stability.
• Idempotent, i.e., results in the same outcomes when run multiple times, ensuring consistency in infrastructure automation and resource management.

How Does Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Work?

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) allows IT operations teams to manage and provision IT infrastructure automatically through code, removing the reliance on manual processes. It is often described as “Programmable Infrastructure.” Here's how it works:

1. Desired State Definition: The code is written to define the desired state of the new machine or environment. This code is executed to ensure the machine or system converges to this state and maintains it over time, even correcting any drifts that may occur.
2. Continuous Convergence: Once the code is executed, it continuously checks and ensures that the system remains desired, automatically correcting any deviations to bring it back into compliance.
3. Role of DevOps: DevOps teams write both the application code and configuration management instructions. These instructions trigger actions across various environments like virtualization, databases, appliances, testing tools, and delivery tools.
4. Automated Environment Creation: In new code delivery, the configuration management instructions automatically create a virtual test environment, an application server, and a database instance. These mirror the live operational environment in terms of service packs, versioning, and live data.
5. Testing and Compliance: Once the virtual environment is created, a set of IaC tools performs necessary compliance checks, error identification, and resolution.
6. Deployment: After successful testing, the new code is ready for deployment to the live IT environment, ensuring automated provisioning and consistency across the system, adhering to version control, and reducing the risk of errors.

This streamlined process supports infrastructure automation and improves resource management and environment drift control, making IaC a powerful method for scalable and agile infrastructure management.

Immutable Infrastructure vs. Mutable Infrastructure

While automating the Infrastructure through IaC and choosing an IaC solution for the same, you first need to decide whether to establish an immutable or mutable infrastructure.

Different Approaches to Infrastructure as Code

After deciding on the type of infrastructure to establish, it’s equally important to choose the right approach for infrastructure automation while selecting an IaC solution. There are two main approaches to consider: the declarative and imperative approaches.

Declarative Approach

The declarative approach is the functional approach that is typically considered the best fit for most organizations. In this approach, you specify the desired state of your infrastructure. For example, if you want to spin up a virtual machine, install the necessary software, resolve interdependencies, and manage software versioning, you only need to define the desired end state. The IaC tools will then automatically handle all the steps required to provision and configure the infrastructure, ensuring it converges to the specified state.

This approach is ideal for scalable IT infrastructure because it emphasizes automated provisioning, immutable infrastructure, and ease of management. However, it requires skilled administrators who specialize in setting up and managing such infrastructure automation.

Imperative Approach

The imperative approach is more procedural, requiring you to define specific steps in the form of automation scripts. These scripts will guide the creation and configuration of the necessary infrastructure. This approach can leverage existing configuration management scripts, making it easier for teams to transition to IaC without needing to change their workflow entirely.

However, the imperative approach can become complex and harder to scale. As the infrastructure grows, managing these scripts can lead to increased maintenance overhead. This approach might be less flexible compared to the declarative approach but provides more control over the individual steps involved in setting up software-defined infrastructure.

Benefits of Implementing Infrastructure as Code

IaC has the following benefits -

Standardization

IaC enables a consistent set of instructions and standardization across the infrastructure. Manual configurations are prone to errors, but with IaC, common standard rules and flows are followed, reducing mistakes and inconsistencies.

Knowledge Sharing

By documenting infrastructure using code, it becomes easier for teams to understand and share knowledge. This promotes a collaborative approach to managing IT infrastructure and makes it simpler for new team members to get up to speed.

Change management/Version control is effortless. 

Quick Infrastructure Provisioning

IaC significantly speeds up the provisioning of infrastructure for development, testing, or production environments. Automation allows teams to quickly deploy new environments, enhancing resource management and supporting rapid iteration cycles.

Improved Customer Satisfaction

With IaC, organizations can deliver quality service components faster, leading to improved customer satisfaction. This enables businesses to stay agile and meet customer expectations without delays in infrastructure setup or changes.

Developer Mindset

IaC enables a developer mindset in infrastructure management. By codifying infrastructure, developers can better understand how infrastructure is deployed, maintained, and upgraded. This leads to a mindset shift, where developers are more involved in infrastructure management and are empowered to make changes more efficiently.

Example Questions

• How does the application deploy?

• What are the ways to maintain the application?

• How are upgrades done?

Better Use of Time

With IaC, repetitive and tedious tasks are offloaded to automation, which reduces the chances of human error and ensures tasks are completed consistently. Developers can focus more on innovative tasks and higher-value activities.

More Efficiency in Software Development

IaC accelerates the software development lifecycle. Developers can quickly provision their CI/CD environments or sandbox environments. The QA team can set up stable test environments for thorough testing, while the security team can create staging environments for user acceptance testing. The entire infrastructure and application source code can then be deployed to production at once.

Improved Reliability

By automating infrastructure changes through IaC, human error is reduced. The software is responsible for initiating infrastructure changes, making the process more reliable and predictable.

Improve the CI/CD Process

IaC enhances the Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) processes. By automating the deployment pipeline, IaC ensures smoother transitions between environments as different versions of the application are moved through development, staging, and production.

Cost-Effectiveness

With IaC in the picture, the organizations reduce time and effort and make infrastructure management cost-effective. The developers tend to be more productive, spend more time on valuable tasks like innovations, develop new features or solutions, and serve their customers better.

Why Infrastructure as Code Matters?

Manually setting up infrastructure using the visual console provided by a Cloud Provider (e.g., AWS Console) or using the CLI tool (e.g., AWS CLI) can be a starting point for small-scale projects. Another option is managing your own physical machines or virtual machines, writing custom scripts for configuration management, deployment, and provisioning.

While a console is an excellent option for learning the basics, managing infrastructure this way quickly becomes tiresome and prone to errors, especially as the setup grows more complex. There's typically no built-in change visibility, and it can become challenging to track actions, document changes, and maintain consistency across environments.

With IaC, you can define infrastructure using logical steps in a declarative language (e.g., YAML), enabling automated provisioning and configuration management. The infrastructure is codified, allowing you to version control it, revert to previous states if something goes wrong, and easily scale your operations. This approach ensures more reliable infrastructure management, reduces human error, and significantly improves efficiency and speed in provisioning and maintaining environments.

How to Adopt and Implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

In earlier years, setting up an entire IT infrastructure was a manual process, requiring specialists to physically configure hardware, install operating systems, and deploy applications. This was time-consuming, error-prone, and resource-intensive, especially with the growing need for scalability and high availability. The introduction of cloud computing helped address some of these challenges, but configuration inconsistency persisted, especially with manual setups.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) offers a solution by allowing you to define, provision, and manage infrastructure through source code instead of relying on manual processes. With IaC, you can automate infrastructure provisioning and ensure consistency across different environments.

Here are the key steps to adopt and implement IaC:

1. Define the Configuration: Specify the configuration parameters for your infrastructure using a Domain-Specific Language (DSL), such as YAML or JSON, within manifest files. These files outline the desired infrastructure setup.
2. Version Control: Store your IaC configuration in a version control system (e.g., Git) to ensure changes are tracked and can be easily reverted if needed.
3. Leverage an IaC Platform: Use tools like Terraform, Ansible, or CloudFormation to automate the creation, configuration, and management of your infrastructure based on the manifest files.
4. Automate: Automate provisioning, updates, and scaling using IaC tools. These tools enable rapid deployment and ensure your infrastructure remains consistent across all environments, including development, testing, and production.

By adopting IaC, you eliminate manual errors, improve scalability, and enhance resource management, leading to more efficient and reliable application deployments.

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Best Practices for Effective Implementation of IaC

Following the best practices is crucial to implementing IaC in the long run. Some of the best practices that can be followed are mentioned below

Codifying Everything in IaC

All the infrastructure specifications should be explicitly coded in the configuration file, such as Ansible playbooks, cloud formation templates, or any other IaC tool you are using.
These configuration files are the single source of truth of your infrastructure specification & describe what infrastructure components will be used & and their configuration. It also depicts interrelation with one another. It can be deployed seamlessly & and quickly without any manual intervention needed for infra setup or configuration management.

Reduce the Documentation

IaC essentially is the documentation, so we shouldn’t have any extra instructions for the documentation to the IT team. In the past, when any updates in the infrastructure component needed to be done, documentation was required to be up to date to ensure no space for inconsistency. Still, this didn’t always happen. With IaC in place, it represents the documentation and is always up to date, which tends to reduce the work of IT personnel.

Additionally, the flowcharts or diagrammatic representation & and setup instructions are necessary for employees who are not familiar with the IaC deployment process. So, it is recommended that documentation be kept to a minimum.

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Maintain Code in the Version Control System

To manage, track, or reconcile the configuration details as they’re written in code. The configuration file should be kept in version control systems, also known as VCS, like git or subversion. Similarly, like any other application code, it is kept in the version control system. to maintain a version of your IaC code.

It also ensures the facility provides an audit trail for the code changes, but it also gives the opportunity to collaborate on peer review or even test the codebase before it goes live. Git branching and the merging feature should enhance the collaboration, and updates of the IaC codebase can be managed properly.

Test Integrates & Deploys with CI/CD

Utilize Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) to manage changes in your IaC codebase. Rigorous testing is crucial to catch issues before deployment. Testing can include unit, integration, or regression tests and should be automated to run whenever changes occur. Additionally, security testing (DevSecOps) is vital to detect threats early in the development lifecycle. CI/CD ensures that infrastructure configurations are applied consistently across multiple environments, such as development, UAT, QA, and production, with minimal effort.

Modularization of Infrastructure

Following the microservices architecture principles, you can modularize your IaC components for reusability and independent deployment. This approach gives you better control over your infrastructure, allowing you to grant access to specific components based on roles. For instance, a junior engineer might only need access to certain components, ensuring limited exposure and reducing the risk of mishaps. Modularization also enables smaller changes, making bug detection easier and enhancing team agility.

By creating smaller, modular templates, you can ensure infrastructure consistency across environments and connect components easily with interfaces like messaging systems or HTTP.

Top IaC Tools and Native Providers

Infrastructure as code Tools 

• Configuration Management Tools: Configuration management tools are designed to install and manage software.
• Configuration Orchestration Tools: Configuration orchestration tools are used to provision servers themselves.

Ansible

Ansible is an open-source tool for DevOps that is used for provisioning and configuring management. Uses SSH protocol to communicate with servers.

• It uses the concept of playbooks. Playbooks are written in .yaml.
• Ansible provides a variety of modules. Modules are the heart of Ansible, enabling it to perform Infrastructure operations.
• Ansible is agentless and uses SSH to push changes to servers.

Terraform

Created by Hashicorps, Terraform allows you to describe the end state of the Infrastructure.

• You describe a DSL configuration called Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL) that is JSON compatible.
• Terraform is a popular tool used by the DevOps team to automate infrastructure tasks. This describes how our Infrastructure should look. A single workflow can manage multiple clouds.
• Allow you to write a terraform plugin that can add new functionality.

AWS CloudFormation

Since AWS CloudFormation is the most popular cloud platform, it provides an automated way to manage an individual's infrastructure with the help of the CloudFormation tool. CloudFormation is a tool by AWS to manage AWS resources effortlessly. Just define resources in a single file, and AWS will create Infrastructure as described in a configuration file with a single click of a button.

• The configuration file is known as a template, and templates can be written in YAML or JSON format.
• Provides you with a roll-back strategy if any error occurs in the new deployment.
• You can deploy a single template file on multiple user accounts and different regions.

Chef

• The plus point is that it supports Ruby-based DSL language.
• It uses cookbooks and recipes to create configuration files. Single cookbooks perform a single task, but they can deliver configuration to multiple servers.

Puppet

Puppet is another popular IaC tool to manage configuration.

• It uses DSL to define the desired end state of Infrastructure, and Puppet will automatically create Infrastructure as you described and make changes to the incorrect statements.
• It uses a declarative approach to describe your Infrastructure's desired state, which is the main difference between a puppet and a chef.

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Major Native IaC Providers

The top native IaC providers include Amazon Web Services(AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform(GCP). They are considered native providers of IaC because their offerings work best within their own cloud platforms. 

IaC on AWS

Managing the entire AWS infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code through AWS CloudFormation brings automation to the manual provisioning process and enables the developers and administrators to instantiate the required Infrastructure through configuration files. 

IaC on Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure enables its customers to easily manage the Azure resources by implementing and taking advantage of Infrastructure as Code through Azure Resource Manager (ARM). With ARM Templates, you can define the desired state of your Infrastructure and achieve consistent results through the principle of idempotency. 

IaC on Google Cloud Platform

GCP provides Google Cloud Deployment Manager as its native infrastructure deployment service to automate the creation, configuration, and management of Google Cloud resources. The configurations for the desired Infrastructure can be treated as Code. The creation of resources defined through those configurations can easily be repeated repeatedly by maintaining consistency.

Optimizing IT Operations with Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) enables IT operations teams to manage, provision, and automate the deployment of IT infrastructure using code. This approach streamlines infrastructure management, ensuring consistency and scalability across environments. By embedding IaC practices, organizations can optimize their IT operations and enhance deployment efficiency. To gain a deeper understanding of code management and best practices for adopting IaC, we recommend consulting with our experts for tailored insights and solutions.

Next Steps for Adopting IaC

Talk to our experts about implementing Infrastructure as Code (IaC), how industries and departments use IaC to automate infrastructure management, optimizing IT support, improving scalability, efficiency, and responsiveness across operations.

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