Choosing Between Mutable and Immutable Infrastructure

When choosing between mutable and immutable infrastructure, assessing if you desire a flexible or restrictive environment is critical. All developers must evaluate the issue of immutable vs. mutable infrastructure.

As a result, before selecting whether to provide or de-provision infrastructure, compare and contrast immutable vs. mutable infrastructure.

What Exactly Is Mutable Infrastructure?

The term "mutable" implies the ability to change—to mutate into something new. The benefit of mutability is critical in the DevOps environment when you want to keep earlier data without worrying about acquiring new infrastructure. Patches may be applied, upgrades, downgrades, and scaling up and down.

Pros of Mutable Infrastructure

Your IT staff does not have to rebuild servers whenever a modification is necessary.
Individual server upgrades may be rolled out, making the updating process speedier.

You can verify that the infrastructure used fulfills the demands of each user.

Each server can be understood individually, making it easier to detect problems.

What Is Immutable Infrastructure?

The state of being unchanging is referred to as "immutability." It is the antonym of changeable, which signifies that the infrastructure cannot be changed once deployed. When modifications are required, you must deploy from scratch, add infrastructure, and decommission existing infrastructure.

Let's go back to the previous example and do it again using the immutable infrastructure. You don't just do it when it's time to update your server. Instead, you construct a new server, which results in the creation of a unique new computer.

You next put your new invention through multiple testing until it is flawless, and then you transfer the traffic. By doing so, you may avoid a difficult update and only transfer users after you're confident in the new server's operation. Furthermore, you don't wind up with a bunch of useless machines.

You may decommission the previous server once you have the new one.

You can decrease configuration drift in a highly interconnected system, such as the cloud or microservices.

Pros of Immutable Infrastructure

Discrete versioning means that each server version is distinct from the others. You will not be able to run two versions at the exact same time. Easier Tracking- Because you build new editions of the server when you have to implement adjustments, you can trace the errors in each version. There is no such thing as a neutral zone. Because the configurations of each server are constant, it is easy to test multiple servers and send out changes. You benefit from predictability because the servers remain constant. Excellent for interconnected situations like cloud technologies. Rollback deployments are possible since earlier versions are unaffected.