The Benefits of Infrastructure as Code

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) automates the provisioning of IT infrastructure by utilizing a high-level descriptive coding language. Developers no longer need to manually set up and maintain servers, operating systems, storage, database connections, and other infrastructure forms whenever they want to build, test, or publish a software application.

In a time when it's not unusual for an enterprise to dispatch hundreds of apps into production each day—and when infrastructure is continuously being fully deployed, broken down, and adjusted both up and down in response to programmer and user requests—automating infrastructure is vital for an organization to control costs, reduce risks, and respond quickly to competitive threats and new entrepreneurial opportunities. This automation is made workable via IaC.

IaC is also a fundamental DevOps discipline crucial to a fast-paced software distribution lifecycle. It permits DevOps teams to swiftly generate and version infrastructure in the same way they form source code and track the versions to minimize deviation among IT environments, which can contribute to major problems during deployment.

Infrastructure as Code Benefits

Traditional IT provisioning is a time-consuming and costly process requiring specialist workers to physically establish the hardware, install and configure operating system software, and link to middleware, networks, storage, etc.

Cloud-native programming and virtualization oust physical hardware management, allowing developers to deploy their virtual servers or containers on demand. However, provisioning virtualized infrastructure continues to divert developers' attention away from coding, forcing them to repeat provisioning work for each deployment. It lacks a clear means to manage environmental changes and prevent inconsistencies influencing deployments.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) completes the process by allowing developers to 'order up' thoroughly documented, the versioned infrastructure simply running a script. The advantages are just what you might expect:

Faster time to production/market: IaC automation significantly reduces the time it takes to deploy infrastructure for development, testing, and production. Because it codifies and records everything, IaC can automate legacy infrastructure provisioning that time-consuming processes would otherwise regulate.

Better stability—less' configuration progression': When ad hoc configuration modifications and upgrades result in mismatched improvement, test, and deployment environments, this is known as configuration drift. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) completes the process by allowing developers to 'order up' thoroughly documented, the versioned infrastructure simply running a script. The advantages are just what you might expect:

Infrastructure as Code Tools 

While numerous open-source IaC tools are available, Ansible and Terraform are the most widely used:

Ansible is an analytical automation tool that allows you to write 'playbooks' to declare the desired outcome for your infrastructure and then handles the provisioning for you. Ansible is a famous alternative for automating Kubernetes deployment and Docker container provisioning.

Terraform is another infrastructure orchestration and declarative provisioning solution that enables engineers to automate the provisioning of all parts of their enterprise's on-premises and cloud-based infrastructure.

Terraform, unlike Ansible, does not provide configuration management capacities; however, it collaborates with configuration management tools to instantly provision infrastructure in the state defined by configuration files and to automatically switch update provisioning when necessary in response to configuration changes.