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Infrastructure As Code (IAC)

IAC Features​

  • Create, manage all the infrastructure provisioning like servers, networking, storage, loadbalancers, other configurations using code rather than manual steps.
  • Write the code to achieve the desired state.
  • Store the created resources details
  • update or delete the resources
  • integrate provisioners such as Chef/Puppet/Ansible/Shell script
  • Manage the lifecycle of resources

Which tool to choose?​

To choose the right IAC tool, understand the below scenarios.

  • What are the cloud providers we are going to use for the next few years ?
  • How many cloud accounts we need to manage ?
  • What are the complexities we will end up with if we choose cloud provider's IAC (ex: AWS Cloudformation)
  • Integration with configuration management
  • Cost associated to manege the tool

Terraform​

  • Compared to other tools like Ansible, Chef, etc; Terraform developed keeping infrastucture as code as a primary strategy. Comparion
  • Supports multiple platform by using 100s of providers already available.
  • Available as freeware & cloud solution.
  • Very simple to manage; we need terraform binary and the storage (ex: S3 bucket) for state files.
  • Great documentation is available for all the providers and it is very easy to learn.
  • However, once the infrastructure is provisioned using terraform, we can use configuration management tools on the instance. Terraform provides very good support for such integrations.
  • Dry run is very well implemented using terraform plan