IaC Overview
One consequence of of splitting the dev and ops tribes apart has been that the best practices of one tribe really didn’t carry across to the other. Ops people are used to solving problems with Ops tools, and Developers are used to solving problems by theirs tools also. A simple example is the use of source control, development team that doesn’t keep their code in source control would be seen as out of touch with industry norms. However, many operations teams don’t use source control, even for their scripts. But what if we approached our systems like code? This would mean using an IDE for development, incorporating unit and integration tests into a CI/CD pipeline, and making dynamic decisions based on system state. This is the essence of Infrastructure as Code—a fully programmatic approach to infrastructure that enables us to apply software development practices to system management.
Before the adoption of Infrastructure as Code (IaC), the traditional infrastructure management was typically a manual process. IT teams would manually set up physical hardware like servers, storage, and networking equipment. System administrators would install operating systems and necessary software manually on each machine Without forgetting that Configuration Files were edited by hand. Yes, I know that In the system administration world automation isn’t new, but IaC talks about a profoundly different level of automation. let’s give an example of Infrastructure as Code. Let’s take a look at Terraform and Ansible. With Terraform, you can completely describe your infrastructure using HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) to create reproducible infrastructure setups across multiple environments. Ansible, on the other hand, allows you to manage your configuration and automate application deployment using YAML-based playbooks. By storing these configurations in source control, everyone can access an accurate reflection of your systems. This approach ensures that your development, staging, and production environments are identical because they are created and managed using the same specifications. With these tools, you can put your infrastructure code in source control, run it through a CI pipeline to test it, and then deploy it confidently.
"By automating infrastructure management, IaC frees up time and resources, allowing teams to focus on innovation rather than repetitive manual tasks.”
Distributed systems, web-scale architectures, microservices, virtualization, cloud computing, and now containers are all becoming increasingly complex. Keeping up with this complexity manually is nearly impossible. Having a developer log in and change code directly in production is something considered to be crazy, we simply don’t do that anymore because it’s considered an anti-pattern. So, why would we do the same with our systems? Avoid setting anything up manually, even UI’s are your enemy. The biggest challenge with Infrastructure as Code is changing mindsets. Tools alone aren’t enough, as a relatively new field, people can’t just fall back on old habits.
