Best practices and tools that will elevate your Infrastructure as Code
In my last blog, I talked about whats and whys of Infrastructure as Code. It is important to understand that IaC is more than just automation. Similar to code development, it is about managing your operations environment in a better way using rules, policies, and structures. In addition, it is about making sure your environments are free from errors and are easily replicable and can be detracted when idle. So, how do you make sure that all the aforementioned things are achieved? The answer is simple — by applying DevOps practices to your infrastructure, combining them with modern coding systems and configuration management and orchestration tools. I have already talked about the benefits that you can rip off by replacing manual processes and standard operating procedures with code to configure discrete hardware devices and operating systems. Let’s see how you can build perfect IaC for your environment by following best practices and some of the industry-leading tools.
Best practices for IaC
Say goodbye to documentation
Documentation is the most hated part while maintaining an infrastructure. Thanks to IaC you won’t have to deal with it henceforth. You don’t have to manually document the state of the machine and the infrastructure; your code will take care of it. And as the code is taking care of the documentation, it will always be up to date. So, next time someone asks for the documentation you will have it at your fingertips which is almost never the case in the manual process (of course if you are too motivated to maintain.) You can go on with the updates and changes to your infrastructure because now you don’t have to worry about the most boring part of it — the documentation.
Continuous testing is everything
In one of the whitepapers, my friend Colwin had mentioned the importance of continuous testing for DevOps. Same applies to your IaC. Maybe it is even more important to test your infrastructure configuration continuously to save yourself from post-deployment issues. Continuous testing practices might involve unit, regression, and functional testing along with automated test cases that can analyze your infrastructure setup every time you change the code.
Bigger roles for version/source control
You might be using Git, CVS, SVN, Bit bucket, VSTS or some other version control tool to maintain a version of your application code. The same practice should be applied to your IaC codebases. All configuration updates, changes can be tracked, audited and managed easily. This will also help the test teams to test the code before your configuration goes live. You can also include code branching and merging for better results.
Immutable infrastructure
High availability and disaster recovery are one of the most essential things one looks for while configuring any data center environment. But it is very difficult to maintain these aspects with the continuous upgrades to software and hardware an environment has to go through. This may result in inconsistencies across the configuration items and devices. The result is known as configuration drift which can subsequently result in system failure and substantial loss to your business operations. One way to avoid configuration drift is by maintaining detailed network addresses of hardware devices and changes to software versions.
But in IaC it will be very difficult to maintain these for obvious reasons. So, the only way to avoid this is by …read more
