What is Infrastructure as Code (IaC)?

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) transforms traditional IT infrastructure management by enabling the provisioning and management of resources through code. Configuration files articulate infrastructure specifications, ensuring consistent and reproducible environments. IaC encourages modularization, allowing components to be combined efficiently through automation. Version control, akin to software development, becomes crucial for tracking changes in configuration files. Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform exemplifies an automation tool that streamlines this process. This paradigm shift from manual management to automated provisioning not only enhances efficiency but also standardizes deployment practices. Cloud computing has played a pivotal role in this evolution, revolutionizing how organizations conceptualize, develop, and maintain their IT infrastructure, marking a significant departure from the challenges faced by system administrators in the past.

Why does it Matter?

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) makes the manual, hectic, and time-consuming process of managing large infrastructure easier and faster in the modern age. Earlier, before IaC managed infrastructure, companies used to pay a huge sum at every stage of building that infrastructure, from network engineers to hardware technicians. Additionally, if data centres needed to be built, it could raise your cost. Because of this, manually managing infrastructure led to slower speeds and accessibility issues. The need for documentation is also fully eliminated because the code acts as the documentation that states the state of the machine, meaning the documentation will always be up-to-date. With the help of IaC, there are fewer errors, increased speed, low cost, and physical server access as it is deployed on public cloud infrastructure, and administrative people usually have access to the servers.

Benefits of Using Infrastructure as Code in DevOps

1. Improved collaboration with the IT team: Now that we have learned what infrastructure as code (IaC) is and why we need it, the crucial part here is how we effectively increase collaboration between the teams.

   Some ways to achieve this are:

   • Clear Understanding of Business Requirements and Objectives: The infrastructure and IT teams should work closely with the developers to understand the infrastructure requirements and choose the right technologies.
   • Daily Meetings/Standups: There should be proper daily communication between teams on how to improve the infrastructure and discuss the errors they are facing with the team.
   • Using a Common Language: It would be a lot easier if all the teams use a similar language to configure and create the infrastructure such as JSON or YAML text or if we are using tools like Terraform we can also use Hashicorp Configuration Language.
   • Continous Improvement: The IT team and the developers should work together to continuously improve their IaC practises. This requires collaboration on feedback and monitoring, with continuous learning and improvement.

Working with the IT team, developers can create an IaC approach that is efficient, scalable, and resilient, with fewer errors and costs.

2. Easy Automation: In a private cloud environment, managing infrastructure is done manually which makes it more difficult to configure & manage networking. Today's digital time and era demands highly customized data environments that can be altered or decommissioned immediately. The Infrastructure as Code(IaC) allows flexibility to streamline infrastructure management and focus more on automation and orchestration capabilities. The CI/CD model is strengthened because it automates all the complex stuff, time-consuming and management operations at the speed that modern applications receive.

3. Standardized Environments: For the Deployment and testing team to be effective they will need a replica of the production environment to run tests and Quality Assurance before deploying the application. To achieve this without Infrastructure as Code(IaC) would be very troublesome, and time-consuming and making a replica using documentation sometimes can be very challenging. Moreover, sometimes there are many instances in a production environment to managing all that would be next to impossible or take a long time. But with Infrastructure as Code(IaC) this becomes more sufficient and easy to do because teams can simply use the same template over and over again helping them to replicate the production environment as it is, guaranteeing that all three environments are identical.

4. Standardized Security: When teams set up resources manually or using scripts there's a chance that a resource or a role is not properly allocated or specific something needs more alterations/changes needed. But with Infrastructure as Code(IaC) defined it's easier to ensure that the template is properly checked and all security measures or possible threats are identified and fixed and go with organizational policies.

IaC DevOps Fundamentals Version Control

Various tools can be used that support Infrastructure as code (IaC) such as AWSCloudformation, Terraform etc. Some tools have their domain-specific language to configure or write scripts. eg Terraform uses HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language). In current times using container images is pretty common because they are conveniently having immutable software packaging. Any changes in the new artefacts are saved in version control and not directly pushed into the production environment. Artefacts used in production always remain the same until they are stopped. A basic principle in DevOps with Infrastructure as Code(IaC) is that everything needs to be stored in a version control including codes, config files, templates scripts etc so that at any given point in time we can see which code was used to generate the infrastructure and if an error is shown which version is causing it. Therefore Version Control is very much necessary.

Test Changes

Changes made to any template can be very crucial and can have a major impact on deployed environments. Hence any changes made need to go through a proper checking if the code is secure and it does not break the environment. Many tests can be performed like unit tests to check the application code runs properly in the environment. With an automated CI/CD pipeline if anything goes bad we can get a system-generated mail with an automated response.

Integrate with a CI/CD Pipeline

Integrating with a CI/CD pipeline can help test the code changes thoroughly, and validate and control them correctly.

• When choosing the Infrastructure as code(IaC) templates keep in mind the code & resources which is going to run and choose accordingly.
• Before committing anything to version control make sure to always test the code.
• Use tools like Jenkins, TravisCI, and GitHub Actions to deploy your IaC files to the target environments.
• Use a monitoring tool to monitor the infrastructure changes and detect any issues

Common Challenges to IaC in DevOps

1. Human Error: When implementing Infrastructure as Code(IaC) there is a potential that there could be a human error. With only a small error it can cause some big issues in the later stage when the application gets deployed at scale. Human error can bring security threats, data integrity issues or break the environment completely. To reduce human errors there should be quality code reviews and automated testing to catch the error beforehand.

2. Unauthorized Access: Since we are going to deploy it on a public cloud we only want it to be accessed by certain people who know what they are doing. To make it safe and secure we assign roles to every team who's going to help build it and only those teams with access can change the code. It will help with unnecessary modification & reduce security breaches.

3. Physical Server Access: Infrastructure as Code(IaC) is a type of code that means there is less need for physical servers because it gets deployed on a public cloud platform eg. AWS or GCP etc. But sometimes physical access may be required for maintenance purposes

4. Multi-environment Challenges: In most organizations there could be multiple environments like testing, production staging area etc which may require different infrastructure and configurations. Also, it depends on which cloud platform you are using because many platforms have their Infrastructure as Code(IaC) platform and because there is no global standard some security services might be different in different cloud services which will need a separate strategy to develop for that cloud provider.