Introduction to Infrastructure as Code
The days of configuring your infrastructure by hand are over. Today, more and more infrastructure is deployed as code. Whether it's HCL with Terraform, TypeScript with AWS CDK, or Python with Pulumi. This transition to Infrastructure as Code is happening fast and changing at a rapid pace. So the question becomes, why is Infrastructure as Code becoming so important? But also, why should a company invest its developers' time in implementing this infrastructure?
Flashback
In the past, infrastructure management was a very time-consuming process. The servers had to be physically set up, configured and manually managed. Only once they were manually configured could software and applications be deployed. This process was slow, labor-intensive and expensive, and left a lot of room for human error. When outages occurred, technicians always had to be on site to diagnose and fix the problem, and due to inconsistencies in the initial configuration, this could become a complex and time-consuming process. Since the networks were not in the cloud, tools like server monitoring were not possible. But fortunately, that has changed in the meantime….
What is Infrastructure as Code?
Infrastructure as Code is a method of managing infrastructure configurations that allows the elements of an organization's infrastructure to be stored in text files within a version control system. These text files contain the specifications of the infrastructure and facilitate editing, duplicating, and distributing configurations.
Source: SEED TS
Using Infrastructure as Code helps to reduce or eliminate the need to manually perform infrastructure management and deployment processes. By providing these infrastructure configuration specifications as code and maintaining detailed version control notes, IaC eliminates undocumented ad hoc configuration changes and creates process consistency.
IaC helps reduce or eliminate environmental drift issues that are common in software development infrastructures. Cloud applications typically consist of networked resources in separate deployment environments for different phases of the release lifecycle. Environmental drift occurs when the infrastructure is not synchronized between development, staging, and production environments.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is an essential way to improve the security of your IT infrastructure. Because all configurations are defined as code and deployed from the cloud, IaC prevents the possibility of shadow IT in an organization and ensures that all changes are properly managed in a version control system and that all configurations are maintained in their desired state. Infrastructure as Code also enables infrastructure configurations to be standardized and scaled in an automated manner.
