Automate and Secure Infrastructure Management for Agile Development
With Infrastructure as Code (IaC), you can:
Version Control Your Infrastructure: Keep a history of changes and facilitate rollbacks to previous versions when necessary.
Automate Routine Tasks: Automate processes such as installations, security updates, and restorations.
Deploy Infrastructure Faster and More Reliably: Accelerate the deployment process while minimizing errors through predefined configurations.
Treating infrastructure as code allows you to adopt powerful practices that software developers have successfully used for years. These practices include version control, peer reviews, automated testing, version tagging, version promotion, and continuous delivery.
Our experience demonstrates that it is possible to accelerate, validate, and automate deployment and production processes using Infrastructure as Code (IaC). We view this approach as an opportunity to start from scratch to deploy infrastructure specifically designed for each application.
IaC enables your developers to work on an infrastructure that closely reflects the production environment, regardless of the development context. This means that your developers can code under “real” conditions, promoting effective continuous integration and providing a reliable reference environment. By adopting this approach, you can generate binaries in a reproducible and secure manner. This same environment will then be used to deploy the binary in production, reducing the risk of issues during production deployment, which are often caused by individual compilations.
However, to automate an environment, it is crucial that it is consistent. How can this be achieved if your development team and operations team are not aligned on the configuration of the environments? IaC facilitates this alignment by providing a common description of application deployment, bringing your teams closer to a DevOps approach. This strengthens collaboration, improves communication, and ensures that all team members work with identical standards for maximum efficiency.
We recommend integrating DevOps practices into your IT infrastructure by using Infrastructure as Code (IaC). Indeed, infrastructure can be included in the same CI/CD pipeline used for the development of your applications. This allows you to subject the infrastructure to the same tests and version controls, providing a significant advantage: it’s very easy to roll back changes.
The key lies in automation and the ability to perform automated testing through continuous integration. Environments can be created on demand and updated when deploying new configurations. However, our experts believe that IaC goes well beyond its primary purpose of infrastructure deployment. It also enables a service-oriented approach, facilitating the integration of practices such as security with DevSecOps, cost management with FinOps, as well as well-designed scaling and resource management mechanisms. Thus, IaC offers your infrastructure teams numerous opportunities to optimize and enhance their operations.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is essential for one major reason: it replaces tribal knowledge with documented technical expertise.
Here’s what this means: when a unique group within an organization solves problems and shares knowledge, it’s beneficial. But what happens if that group leaves the company or changes roles? All that critical knowledge disappears, leading to work duplication and wasted time.
IaC provides an immutable, documented, and shared truth, ensuring that the work done remains useful even after the original team is gone. By replacing tribal knowledge, infrastructure becomes a fully-fledged technical component of the environment, offering substantial long-term benefits.
IaC eliminates the need for separate documentation by becoming a single source of truth. It describes the configuration, components, and relationships of the infrastructure. Any changes made to these elements are immediately reflected in the code.
This auto-documentation process maintains clear version control, facilitates the review of previous configurations, and helps understand the changes made. A clear code structure and meaningful names break down complex infrastructures into more understandable parts, improving readability and management.
IaC enhances the Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline by ensuring consistent integrations and faster deployments. Automating deployments allows code to be deployed across infrastructures of any size with fewer manual interventions and reduced errors.
Code is portable, reusable, and can be managed with version control. Changes made to IaC are validated in the version control system, where they can be tested, collaborated on, and approved by peers. Once validated, these changes can be deployed automatically to thousands of systems just as easily as to one.
The version control system also provides an audit history, allowing for clear tracking of actions. Using a CI/CD pipeline optimizes this process for continuous delivery, fostering collaboration, reducing deployment risks, and maintaining an ongoing record of changes.
Beyond scalability, IaC offers significant advantages for auditability and compliance. The ability to track infrastructure changes saves time during audits and ensures compliance with security standards.
With IaC, you can easily demonstrate compliance to auditors. When compliance becomes code, it can be automatically applied and enforced. In cases of conflicts between system configurations and the desired state, these issues can be corrected by default.
Furthermore, IaC simplifies testing, debugging, and disaster recovery, providing a repeatable approach for managing emerging issues.
Traditional IT management methods are not suited to the modern demands for scalability and agility. Graphical tools make it difficult to share configurations, conduct peer reviews, or revert to previous configurations. Scripts, on the other hand, are often too fragile and dispersed to be effective in a dynamic environment.
IaC addresses these challenges by offering portable, reusable, shareable, and testable code. Manual changes should be avoided, as they increase the risk of errors.
IaC enhances the software development lifecycle through its consistency and repeatability.
IaC ensures continuous and reliable management throughout your infrastructure’s lifecycle.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) can be approached in two ways: imperative or declarative. We recommend using Ansible for the imperative approach, which ensures idempotence, guaranteeing that repeated actions yield the same result. This method minimizes human errors and keeps your infrastructure aligned with initial expectations.
Terraform, a leading tool for the declarative approach, is compatible with a wide range of infrastructures, from cloud services (like AWS and GCP) to on-premise setups. Its flexibility allows for deploying infrastructure using just three commands.
It is essential to adopt a cloud-agnostic strategy by implementing a CI/CD pipeline to automate deployment and choosing the tools that best meet your needs. With IaC and automation, you enhance performance, improve security, and accelerate your company’s time to market.
We conduct an analysis of your automation processes to identify optimization opportunities.
We assist you in implementing an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach to modernize the deployment and management of your infrastructures.
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