Whether you’re a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), Cloud Engineer, or IT Admin, you will be required to spin up, configure, and manage all sorts of cloud resources. A code-first infrastructure approach to deploying and managing cloud resources will offer you and your team many benefits over the long term when it comes to infrastructure automation, efficiency, version control, and cloud agility.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools, such as HashiCorp Terraform, Azure Bicep and AWS CloudFormation, enable teams to define, deploy, and maintain cloud infrastructure declaratively and reliably. This article explores the benefits of adopting a code-first infrastructure deployment approach to better streamline your cloud infrastructure management.
Automation and Efficiency from the Beginning
Using a code-first approach to infrastructure management introduces automation from the very beginning. This helps simplify the deployment of complex cloud environments and configurations. IaC tools like HashiCorp Terraform, Azure Bicep, and AWS CloudFormation allow engineers to define infrastructure resources through code in a declarative manner. This allows infrastructure to be deployed and scaled both manually or via Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. This automation will reduce manual error and help ensure infrastructure is consistently provisioned with fewer errors. This approach can greatly accelerate the initial setup and ensures uniformity across deployments, which is especially valuable in large-scale cloud environments where manual setup can lead to inconsistencies.
Agility and Safe Configuration Changes
A code-first approach makes it easier to apply changes to infrastructure without breaking existing configurations. IaC tools enable Cloud Engineers and SREs to safely and reliably modify specific resource configurations without affecting the entire infrastructure. For example, HashiCorp Terraform provides a “plan” that shows a preview of the configuration changes before they are applied or implemented in the actual environment. This allows teams to validate updates and avoid mistakes that could cause service disruptions and end-user downtime. Additionally, these tools make it easy to roll back changes if any issues arise, ensuring a safer and more agile approach to managing cloud resources.
Version Controlled Infrastructure
One of the great benefits of using IaC is the ability to version control your infrastructure. By storing configuration files in version control systems like Git, GitHub or Azure DevOps Repos, all changes are tracked and traceable. This fosters a collaborative environment where multiple engineers can review and approve changes before they are applied. This is a practice used by software developers writing applications for years, and offers the same benefits when applied to infrastructure code as well. Having the infrastructure code in a version control system ensures transparency, enables rollbacks, and helps maintain a clear history of modifications. This is particularly important for audit trails, governance, accountability, and allowing organizations to stay compliant with industry standards.
Rapid and Consistent Environment Deployment
With IaC tools, replicating environments becomes a fast and reliable process. This is especially important when managing multiple infrastructure environments, like Dev, Stage, Test, and Production. This also helps when there are multiple Production environments as well. It’s important to keep the environment configurations as identical and consistent as possible. Since the infrastructure is defined through code, you can easily deploy the same configurations multiple times, ensuring that every environment behaves consistently. This capability not only reduces the risk of errors caused by misconfigured environments, but it also speeds up the deployment process, making it easier to support rapid deployment of infrastructure configuration changes, as well as agile methodologies.
Code Reuse for Similar Infrastructure
Infrastructure as Code tools encourage reusability, enabling Cloud Engineers and SREs to define common infrastructure components once and reuse them across multiple projects. HashiCorp Terraform, Azure Bicep and AWS CloudFormation all support modularity, allowing teams to encapsulate repeated configurations as reusable modules. This dramatically reduces duplication of effort and helps standardize deployments. Engineers can share these modules across teams or projects, ensuring that best practices are consistently applied while reducing time spent on reconfiguring infrastructure for similar use cases.
Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud Support with Terraform
HashiCorp Terraform stands out from the others with its ability to manage multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments using a single, unified configuration language within a single IaC project. Unlike Azure Bicep, which is tailored specifically for Microsoft Azure resources, Terraform supports multiple cloud platforms like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure through its huge library of Terraform Providers. This flexibility allows organizations to manage their infrastructure across different platforms without being locked into a single vendor. For companies with hybrid environments or multi-cloud strategies, Terraform enables a cohesive management approach, that can simplify the process of deploying, scaling, and maintaining resources across multiple clouds and on-premises.
Conclusion
By adopting a code-first approach to cloud infrastructure management, engineering teams and organizations can significantly streamline and improve their processes. Supporting deployment automation from the beginning with higher agility when managing configuration changes that grants the ability to increase infrastructure configuration efficiency, reliability, and overall team scalability.
Looking for help? If you’re looking for help managing your cloud deployments, getting started with IaC, or any other SRE and DevOps related questions, please reach out to Chris Pietschmann to schedule a call to discuss your infrastructure needs.
Original Article Source: Benefits of Code-First Infrastructure Deployments with HashiCorp Terraform and Azure Bicep by Chris Pietschmann (If you’re reading this somewhere other than Build5Nines.com, it was republished without permission.)
