What is IAC - Infrastructure as code

Infrastructure as code is a concept that allows us to provision and manage our infrastructure as a code instead of doing the same through manual labor. This ensures our infrastructure to be managed in a faster and more reliable manner in an automated environment. We can do this because of the infrastructure being in a code form, and we can make changes without much of a wait time and repercussions.

What are the different types of IAAC tools in the market ?

• Terraform
• CloudFormation
• Ansible
• Chef
• Puppet

Challenges without IAC

Before IAC, all these tasks were done by the Engineers manually to set up the infrastructure.

1. Setup Servers
2. Configure Networking
3. Create Route Tables
4. Install Software
5. Configure Software
6. Install DB

In addition to Manual setup another challenge was to maintain the tasks which included tasks like

1. Update Versions
2. Deploy new release
3. DB Backups/Updates
4. Recover Apps
5. Add recover servers

All these tasks took a lot of time and efforts from system engineers and makes the whole process much slower.

IAC automates these tasks in 3 main categories

1. Infrastructure provisioning

- spinning up new servers
- network configuration
- creating load balancer
- configuration on infrastructure level

2. configuration of provisioned

- infrastructure
- installing apps on servers
- managing those apps
- prepare the infrastructure/servers to deploy your app

3. Deployment of the Main required application

Lifespan of different tools in Infrastructure management