Infrastructure as a code (IaaC)

Terraform on public cloud

Infrastructure as a Code (IaaC) refers to the delivery and management of infrastructure through high-level descriptive code compared to manual processes.

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 the developer and user demands. This automation is made feasible via IaaC.

The provisioning of IT infrastructure is automated using Infrastructure as a 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.

Avoid manual configuration to enforce consistency

IaaC makes it simple to change and distribute configurations by generating configuration files that contain infrastructure specifications. This guarantees that the same environment is established. IaaC facilitates configuration management and prevents ad hoc, undocumented configuration changes by codifying and documenting 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 as a Code (IaaC) Benefits

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.

Infrastructure as a Code can assist businesses in managing their requirements for IT infrastructure while enhancing consistency, lowering error rates, and eliminating human configuration.

 

Application Modernization by Refactoring

IaaC Reduces costs and increases ROI

In addition to drastically lowering the time, effort, and specialized skill needed to provide and grow infrastructure, IaaC enables businesses to fully leverage the consumption-based pricing model of cloud computing. Additionally, it frees developers’ time to work on creative, crucial software solutions rather than plumbing.

IaaC enables effective development 

Infrastructure as a Code can accelerate each stage of the software delivery lifecycle by streamlining provisioning and guaranteeing infrastructure consistency.

IaaC Speeds up the time to production

Infrastructure as a Code 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 the production infrastructure as needed). 

IaaC Provides 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.

IaaC Improves 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.

 

Benefits of Using Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Top Benefits of Using Infrastructure as a Code (IaaC)

Infrastructure as Code(IaaC) with Terraform

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 supports multiple cloud platforms’ infrastructure management.
  • You can develop infrastructure code quickly with the help of human-readable configuration language.
  • Terraform’s state allows it to monitor resource changes during deployments.
  • To cooperate on infrastructure security, you can commit your configurations to version control.
 
Infrastructure As Code (IaC) with Terraform
Infrastructure as a Code (IaaC) with Terraform

Manage any infrastructure

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 has created over 1,000 providers.

Standardize your deployment workflow

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:

  • Scope – Identify the infrastructure for your project.
  • Author – Write the configuration for your infrastructure.
  • Initialize – Install the plugins Terraform needs to manage the infrastructure.
  • Plan – Preview the changes Terraform will make to match your configuration.
  • Apply – Make the planned changes.

Track your infrastructure

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.

Collaborate

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 a 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.

The professionals at Arcana 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 Arcana so that you can focus more on developing apps and less on creating environments. To learn more, visit Arcana.

Arcana Services

Modernization Strategy

Identify the best strategy for application modernization to achieve goals like optimization, security, and scalability.

Apps and Microservices Development

Arcana develops cloud applications following agile development methods and strategies to ensure the use of microservices and advanced APIs.

Container Adoption

Arcana offers containerized solutions for the deployment of modern and advanced distributed applications.

Stay updated

Subscribe to get the latest news, industry trends, blog posts and updates.

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
guest
0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

Oxygenate Pakistan

Talks by distinguished professionals from Arcana Info and WSO2, unpacking state of the art integration runtime for enterprise.

Datacenter Upgradation

Data Center Upgradation

A data center upgrade is often strenuous, but it’s necessary. Take these steps to ensure that your mission-critical workloads remain unaffected.

All digital services in one place

Explore our services and solutions to learn more about your industry options and in addition receive a quote from us.

0
Would love your thoughts, please comment.x
()
x