What Is Infrastructure-as-Code and What Are Its Benefits?

A 2020 report found that 75 percent of organizations need to upgrade their IT infrastructure in order to take advantage of new technologies. Many are leveraging the cloud to minimize capital investments and implement new solutions with limited risk. However, the manual processes associated with building and configuring new environments often create substantial roadblocks. IT teams devote significant time to mundane, repetitive tasks, delaying progress on new initiatives.

Infrastructure-as-Code (IAC) enables organizations to automate provisioning, monitoring and management, minimizing errors and accelerating deployments. Also referred to as software-defined infrastructure, IAC expands on the concept of scripts by using a higher-level language to program more complex deployment processes. The applications of DevOps methodologies further enable the consistent and reliable delivery of infrastructure at scale.

IAC offers a number of advantages, including reduced costs, greater speed and efficiency, and improved security. As with any IT operational process, best practices can help maximize the benefits of IAC.

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How Does IAC Work?

With IAC, the configurations of virtual machines, databases, networks and other resources are stored in files that are committed to a version control system. IT operations teams employ continuous implementation / continuous delivery (CI/CD) processes to manage configuration changes.

There are two approaches to IAC programming: declarative and imperative. A declarative approach defines the configuration and resources a system needs, and the IAC tool performs the steps required to reach that result. If the configuration changes, the IAC tool applies those changes. An imperative approach is more like scripting in that it defines the specific commands needed to achieve the desired end state.

IAC tools automatically apply the configuration files using push or pull methods. In the push method, a centralized system pushes the file out to the system to be configured. In the pull method, the system to be configured sends a request to the centralized system for the file.

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Benefits of IAC

Efficiency is the primary benefit of IAC. Provisioning and configuring infrastructure manually is an expensive, time-consuming process. That overhead has increased dramatically with the more frequent release of software. With IAC, developers don’t have to manually provision infrastructure components for every application. Production-like test environments can be spun up and torn down quickly using predefined configurations.

IAC also reduces the risk of environment drift. Inconsistencies are bound to occur when infrastructure is configured manually, resulting in “snowflake” systems that are difficult to maintain using automated tools. IAC ensures that every target system is configured the same way, and creates an auditable trail of configuration changes.

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IAC Challenges

Despite its many advantages, IAC has been slow to take off. Many organizations find it difficult to transition to a fully automated, software-driven environment, and lack the skillsets needed to define infrastructure in code.

Following best practices can help make IAC more effective. A key principle is to implement and monitor strict version control, and test extensively before release to prevent errors from proliferating. All infrastructure specifications should be maintained in configuration files, which serve as the “single source of truth” for infrastructure management.

With extensive expertise in cloud and hybrid environments and software development, DeSeMa can help you adopt IAC tools and techniques and utilize them to achieve high levels of automation. We are also specialists in DevOps practices and CI/CD toolchains, enabling us to effectively integrate IAC into your operational processes.

IAC has gained traction among DevOps teams in recent years, but there is significant room for growth. Many organizations still struggle to configure, implement and maintain infrastructure using manual processes. IAC can eliminate those headaches and bring the efficiency needed to drive IT initiatives.