Until few years ago managing an IT infrastructure was a very tough job. System admins had to manage and configure all these hardware and software manually.
However in last few years, things have changed dramatically. This traditional approach of manually managing the infrastructure becomes an un-scalable solution to meet the demands of DevOps based modern development cycles. And that's how Infrastructure as a Code(Iac) has become the de-facto solution in development today.
What is IaC ?
Infrastructure as Code or IAC is the process of provisioning and managing the infrastructure through code instead of through manual processes. With IaC, configuration files are created that contains your infrastructure specifications which makes it easier to edit and distribute configurations. This means you can create reproducible infrastructure configurations.
Why IaC ?
Now that we know what is IaC and what problem does it solves, lets understand 'why' of IaC. Why is it needed?
As mentioned above, managing IT infrastructure was a manual process which would result in several problems like increased cost, scalability, availability, monitoring and performance visibility. Let's discuss more about few of the challenges.
The major problem is cost, as you'd have to hire multiple professionals to perform the necessary tasks at each step of the process. All these technicians need to be managed and paid, obviously, which leads to more management overhead and adds more complexity to communication inside the organization.
Another challenge is scalability and availability. Since the manual configuration is too slow it used to take long time for the servers to be ready for any application to run.
Next big problem is monitoring and performance visibility. Now that you have all the infrastructure in place, how do you monitor it to ensure it's performance optimally? If you have any issue in the infrastructure, how do you pinpoint exactly where the issue is coming from? Is it the network, the server, or the application?
Last but not least is the inconsistency. If you have several people manually deploying configurations, discrepancies aren’t going to be unavoidable.
With IaC defined, it provides ways to mitigate above problems and several other benefits as below.
1. Eliminates the need for manual infrastructure provisioning and management allowing users to keep all the environments within the defined configuration.
2. Since infrastructure is built through code, you guarantee the same configurations will be deployed over and over, without discrepancies.
3. One of the major benefit IaC provides is speed. IaC enables you to quickly set up complete infrastructure by running a script.
4. It allows infrastructure to be easily integrated into version control mechanisms to create trackable and auditable infrastructure changes.
5. It provides the ability to introduce extensive automation for infrastructure management. These things lead to IaC being integrated into CI/CD pipelines as an integral part of the SDLC.
6. By defining IaC, you can deploy your infrastructure architectures in many stages. That makes the whole software development life cycle more efficient, raising the team’s productivity to new levels.
7. Another benefit of IaC is lowering the costs of infrastructure management.
8. Having the ability to easily scale up infrastructure management without increasing CapEx or OpEx.
When to use IaC ?
IaC may seems unnecessary for simpler, less complex requirements, however that isn't accurate. Looking at the advantages IaC provides one should use it whenever there is a requirement to manage any type of infrastructure.
Due to the numerous benefits it offers compared to the manual tasks, Infrastructure as Code has become a vital part of modern application development and deployment pipelines. It is achieved by facilitating quick and trackable infrastructure changes that directly integrate into CI/CD platforms.
Because of the different tools used and platforms targeted at different use cases, it may seems difficult to start with IaC, however once you learn these tools, you will have a powerful infrastructure management mechanism in place.
With this I'll wrap up this post here.
In the next blog we will see how IaC works and what are the different tools used for IaC.
Thank you for reading!
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