What Is Infrastructure as Code? Benefits and Best Practices

Software systems are becoming increasingly sophisticated and complex, requiring an innovative approach to technologies. At the same time, many companies still employ manual labor when setting up, operating, and managing their infrastructures. This trend leads to delays, human error, inconsistencies, and discrepancies. Moreover, organizations are wasting talent on mundane and repetitive tasks when they could be creating new tools and contributing to the company’s innovations. On top of that, manual labor equals elevated costs and management overheads. So, where’s the solution?

In particular, along with moving to cloud platforms, fast scaling, and implementing DevOps practices, these companies can adopt an approach aimed at managing their digital infrastructures more effectively—via automation through code, which is what the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach actually embodies. Its relevance is confirmed by statistics—by 2030, the IaC market will grow to $3,4 billion, with a CAGR of 20.3%. 

Infrastructure as Code can help you solve all aforementioned issues and deliver the proper level of automation and optimization. In this article, we’ll answer the question of what it is, as well as explore the advantages of Infrastructure as Code, its best practices, and prominent tools.

IaC tools operate using either declarative or imperative approaches. An imperative model allows software developers to specify the steps that the system needs to take to make a certain change, and the machine will follow each step. A declarative approach takes the opposite route and enables users to define the end requirement without elaborating on the steps, and the system figures out which step to take to achieve the set goal. Most IaC tools opt for the declarative approach due to its higher flexibility and automation.

What’s Wrong with Traditional Infrastructure?

The traditional IT infrastructure management processes are manual, which inevitably leads to human error and higher costs. That fact is that infrastructure managers have to manually configure the servers to meet the requirements of operating systems and applications before deploying the app. Therefore, the first downside of the traditional approach is costs and resources, as a company needs to hire professionals who can perform these tedious yet complex tasks. These processes require quite a few experts as well as management to control the operations. This, in turn, creates overhead and complicates the communication within the company.

Additionally, manual configuration is much slower than automated processes, which leads to delays and later to unavailability of the application. Organizations lose much-needed scalability, especially during peaks, and risk keeping their apps unavailable for longer periods. On top of that, whenever you experience an issue with the infrastructure, it becomes extremely difficult to identify the cause. Without the continuous monitoring and reporting that IaC tools deliver, professionals might spend a lot of time trying to find root causes. This will eventually lead to churn and poor reputation among users.

Nowadays systems are becoming more and more complex, which, paired with cloud migration, creates an imminent need for an infrastructural coding approach. The widespread adoption of microservices requires separate provision of infrastructures for hundreds of small applications as opposed to several large ones. The automation that IaC delivers makes this possible and helps companies go to the next level.

At the same time, IaC also facilitates DevOps integration by offering developers quick access to the IT infrastructure that DevOps requires to perform. Businesses can now adopt DevOps best practices, including continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) and version control which make their activities safer, more efficient, and optimal.

Infrastructure as Code Advantages

Infrastructure as Code comes with a variety of advantages that can make your business more productive and technologically advanced. From reducing costs and offering more scalability to eliminating security vulnerabilities and providing a disaster recovery solution, the adoption of IaC can significantly benefit your company. Now that we’ve discussed the challenges of the traditional IT infrastructure management approach, let’s move on to the benefits of the Infrastructure as Code model.

Higher Speed

The automation of Infrastructure as Code provides much higher processing speeds when it comes to setup and configuration. Developers simply run a script to set up their infrastructure for any environment—including development, deployment, testing, production, and more. Your employees no longer need to wait for lengthy setups or waste their precious time on complex configurations. Higher speed enables smoother application operation, better performance and responsiveness, and improved user experience.

Cost Reduction

One of the significant benefits of Infrastructure as Code is cost reduction. First of all, you’ll lower your human resource costs by automating tasks. The costs of hiring and onboarding a new employee alone are quite high, but when you also consider pension, taxes, salary, and office equipment, the expense gets noticeably high.

Secondly, you can avoid spending your resources on physical hardware configurations to manage infrastructures. IaC goes hand in hand with cloud services, and by opting for both you’ll be able to substantially decrease your expenses. Finally, your existing workers can focus on achieving goals and striving for innovation instead of performing repetitive tasks that an IaC tool can easily handle. By freeing up your personnel from executing mundane tasks, you’ll be able to provide them with more challenging and interesting endeavors.

Scalability 

The combination of cloud services and Infrastructure as Code tools allows companies to deliver the scalability they need to keep their apps alive. Scalability is the cornerstone of modern application development as the lack thereof can significantly hinder your growth and ruin the app’s reputation. During peak seasons and rapid growth, the app’s user base can quickly expand, which can result in unavailability and delays. Automated scalability solves this problem and allows you to seamlessly grow and shrink at your own pace.

Consistency

Another benefit of Infrastructure as Code that makes its systems compelling is the reduction of human error. Since manual work is no longer needed, teams can use a standardized infrastructure setup to avoid mistakes. Deploying infrastructure using IaC tools is repeatable and helps you eliminate harmful configuration drifts and missing dependencies. By using configuration files as the single source of truth, you’ll prevent discrepancies and deviations and ensure a stable system.

Security 

The standardization and automation that IaC brings to the table ensure infrastructure consistency and security. Infrastructure as Code can also serve as a form of documentation of the correct way of setting up and managing the infrastructure. Another security benefit is the version control that allows for safe and reversible changes in the code. On top of that, since the changes are no longer made manually but performed in code, the risk of unauthorized change also decreases. As a result, every change can be tracked, documented, and even reversed by using version control. Finally, auditing also becomes more available since everything is documented in code and can be easily accessible to external and internal auditors.

Accountability

Elevated accountability is another benefit of Infrastructure as Code that comes from the transparency that IaC systems enable. Since everything is documented and defined in code, you can easily track who made the change, when it was made, and for what reason. This eliminates hours of communication in the pursuit of figuring out who did what and why. Having a reliable log system that captures every slight change helps companies increase transparency and thus solve conflicts much easier. It will primarily save you a lot of time but also encourage developers to think autonomously and make changes when required.

Disaster Recovery

Regardless of your tools and level of expertise, something still can go wrong for one or another reason. Having version control at your hand greatly benefits your company and provides a disaster recovery option. Well-preserved version control allows you to instantaneously reject any recent changes by simply going back to the previous version. Especially in the case when you cannot quickly figure out the root cause of the issue, disaster recovery is a lifesaver for your organization.

Improved Efficiency 

IaC systems can also play into the software development life cycle by allowing deployment in various stages. For example, you can set up a sandbox environment for developers to let them write code in isolation to try out new ideas. QA specialists can also take advantage of this system to run tests using a copy of the production environment without interfering with the actual code. Finally, you can instantly deploy the app in one go by pushing both infrastructure and code to production. As a result, departments can work in parallel without causing any interference or conflicts of interest. 

Adopting DevOps Best Practices

Another one on the list of advantages is the adoption of DevOps practices and the CI/CD pipeline. Infrastructure as Code in DevOps offers a unified infrastructure configuration system. Additionally, IaC facilitates CI/CD adoption by providing automation and monitoring throughout the entire development life cycle. As a result, you can meet the industry standards and work in a more efficient environment a lot quicker than without IaC implementation.

Self-service for Developers

Developers don’t have to wait for the infrastructure setup to do their tasks or make requests to perform a small change. IaC systems encourage more independence and personal accountability which simultaneously simplifies the processes and force developers to make only important changes. The ability to create separate environments also adds to self-sufficiency and helps all specialists work on their tasks interdependently. All in all, the self-service option benefits the entire organization and enhances productivity and communication.

IaC Tools

There are quite a few IaC tools that are currently available on the market that can help you learn and adopt the concept of Infrastructure as Code. Some programs focus mainly on infrastructure provisioning and management, whereas others pay more attention to configuration management. In this section, we’ll go over a few prominent examples of IaC tools to help you make the right decision for your company.

Terraform

Terraform is one of the leading platforms for Infrastructure as Code and supports systems like AWS, Azure, Alibaba Cloud, Kubernetes and others. The tool offers infrastructure provision and management across platforms and guarantees the desired configuration setup. 

Ansible

Ansible is an open-source configuration management tool with IaC capabilities that offers wide infrastructure provisioning features but lacks infrastructure management functions. 

Pulumi

Pulumi is another IaC tool that provides infrastructure setup and management features. The main advantage of this system is the freedom of programming language, including Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, Go, and C#.

Chef

Chef is a robust configuration management system that offers excellent automation functions as well as infrastructure management features. The program is known for its simple integration into DevOps practices and great collaboration tools. 

CFEngine

CFEngine is a platform that helps you to manage configurations and does not focus on infrastructure management. However, the tool allows you to meet even the most complex configuration requirements and can be very useful in the case of a complicated product.

AWS CloudFormation

CloudFormation is an AWS platform that is created to manage AWS and APN cloud infrastructures. Enriched with powerful CI/CD tools, AWS Serverless Application Model for serverless app development, ChangeSet for changes monitoring, and much more, this IaC solution becomes an indispensable assistant in safe and fast resource allocation and management. In general, if you’re already using AWS for their cloud services, you may benefit from this collaboration. 

Puppet

Puppet is a popular open-source solution that is effective in managing and automating system configurations. Thanks to the declarative syntax that allows you to correctly define resource states, this tool ensures consistency between systems. In general, its usefulness is undeniable in large-scale environments, where the highest priority is to ensure stability and centralized access. There’s also functionality for orchestration and visualization, which allows specialists not to resort to third-party solutions.

Crossplane

Crossplane is a Kubernetes extension for different cloud scenarios. It significantly enriches the functionality of the cluster, turning it into a full-fledged platform for infrastructure management. In particular, this is achieved through custom resource definitions and the Kubernetes API. It’s also worth noting that Crossplane is compatible with solutions from different cloud vendors, which allows project teams to implement complex multi-cloud schemes. 

Azure ARM Templates

A proprietary solution from Microsoft, Azure ARM Templates uses JSON to define resources and configurations. It also has advanced automation and role-based access control. Overall, it boasts a modular approach and conditional logic, which makes it probably the best choice for companies that are already actively using Azure cloud services.

Google Cloud Deployment Manager

Google Cloud Deployment Manager simplifies the deployment of resources to the Google Cloud environment. This is partly due to the YAML configuration files, as it’s responsible for easier dependency management and, in general, automates resource allocation. Moreover, thanks to the integration with Google Cloud, this tool is fully integrated with other services of this ecosystem.

IaC Best Practices

Adopting IaC can be quite challenging at first, however some tips can simplify the experience for you. In this next part, we’ll explore Infrastructure as Code best practices that will help you make the most of its adoption.

1. Maintain a Single Source of Truth

Code all infrastructure specifications in configuration files and use them as the single source of truth for all the infrastructure management activities. Avoid maintaining additional documentation stored outside of the source of truth to prevent misinformation and discrepancies.

2. Create Version Control

Unify all your configuration files in one location and create version control to prevent disastrous events when your application goes down.

3. Test and Monitor Configurations 

Since IaC is actual code, it can and should be continuously tested to avoid errors and inconsistencies. IaC tools can also equip you with systems that offer testing and monitoring options and allow you to validate the servers before the production stage. 

4. Lint Your Code

Linting helps to detect problems in your code before it is deployed and to fix them before they cause failures in your workflows. Usually, IaC solutions like Terraform and Ansible have built-in linting tools (in particular, tflint and ansible-lint, respectively).

5. Implement Collection and Analysis of Logs

Configuring logs helps to track and document infrastructure changes. In particular, the deployment process (including successful and unsuccessful operations), the time of execution of operations, their errors and warnings, changes in the infrastructure (for instance, created/deleted/modified resources, the state of the infrastructure before and after code execution, detected errors, etc.) have to be logged. For even greater convenience, you can use Logstash for centralized collection of logs from all IaC tools, and Datadog or Prometheus for automated log analysis.

6. Implement Internal Standards

Finally, it’s also recommended to implement internal corporate standards for code, logging, and revisions to simplify the process of working with IaC tools.

Challenges of Using Infrastructure as Code

Along with all the benefits of Infrastructure as Code, it’s worth noting that this approach is quite difficult to adopt. In fact, there are a number of challenges that even experienced teams often face.

• Insufficient testing of infrastructure code. Due to the desire to implement changes as quickly as possible, teams don’t devote enough time to IaC testing, implementing only a small number of manual tests. To avoid this problem, it makes sense to resort to automated testing in isolated environments, especially in the case of complex configurations.
• Hardcore parameters. Too many parameters (including resource names and regions) reduce the flexibility of the infrastructure code, and, therefore, it may not be suitable for reuse. The solution to this problem can be to initially adhere to its modular structure, as well as the introduction of variables and templates.
• Lack of version control of the infrastructure code. This often leads to difficulties in tracking changes and rollbacks in case of errors. To prevent this from happening, you have to store your code in GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket repositories, enable code review mechanisms, and set up state locking.
• Non-compliance with security standards. To prevent data leaks and network attacks, you should implement data encryption via secret managers, avoid storing access keys directly in the code, and use automated audit tools.
• Inconsistency between environments. If you need to implement different configurations for each environment, you will also have to create separate workspaces for them and separate files to store their variables. You can also use containerization tools to unify the environment.

Conclusion

Now you know the definition of Infrastructure as Code, its benefits, and popular IaC tools. In general, Infrastructure as Code can accelerate all infrastructure-related tasks and deliver security, standardization, consistency, and cost savings. If you would like to benefit from this technology, get in touch with NIX to help you learn more about it. We’re a team of software development experts with a diverse portfolio of successful cases. Our in-depth knowledge and broad experience will help you utilize the best IaC tools and advantages and build the applications that you need to achieve your goals.