Importance of Infrastructure as Code

What is Infrastructure as Code and Why is it Important?

Infrastructure management can become very painful as your business grows. You might end up paying a lot for management, deployment, installation, and upgrades of your infrastructure. Similarly, it is hard to implement dynamic scale-up and scale-down during peak load — and in case of disaster, recovery can be painful. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) can help you fix all these issues.

Benefits of Using Infrastructure as Code

1. Reduces Human Error

You can deploy your infrastructure using CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment). With this approach, the chances of human error are eliminated — you get the same infrastructure every time you deploy, even if you deploy 100 times.

2. Speed of Deployment

Tools like Ansible and Puppet are native to the operating system and can execute tasks much faster than manual processes. For example, deploying a SQL Server Database manually can take up to one hour — the same installation can finish in minutes using Puppet or Ansible.

3. Improved Scalability

With IaC, you can scale up and scale down your VMs at any time. For example, using Kubernetes or OpenShift with cloud config in AWS or Ansible Tower, you can scale on demand based on conditions defined in code — such as spinning up another VM when CPU exceeds 90%.

4. Cloud Cost Saving

As mentioned above, you can scale up and scale down automatically based on code. This can save a lot of money — for example, if your website has low traffic at night, you can scale down resources based on CPU usage and scale them back up during peak hours. This works across AWS, Azure, and GCP.

Is it Hard to Implement IaC?

Simply NO! There are many open-source tools that help you implement IaC, all supported by major companies:

• Terraform — by HashiCorp, platform-independent
• Ansible — acquired by Red Hat, agentless
• Puppet — declarative configuration management
• Chef — Ruby-based configuration management
• SaltStack — high-speed infrastructure automation
• AWS CloudFormation — native AWS IaC
• Google Cloud Deployment Manager — native GCP IaC