Companies are under constant pressure to innovate and deliver new products and services to provide for their customers and appeal to new audiences. In the pursuit of agility, organisations are trading manual infrastructure management for Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
What is Infrastructure-as-Code?
Infrastructure as Code is a method of managing infrastructure components such as databases, networks and servers using code rather than relying on manual processes. It essentially treats infrastructure as a software application.
IaC continues to grow in popularity. But why is this? The rapid rise of IaC is primarily driven by the shift to cloud computing from on-premises computing and the need for businesses to be agile and scalable in rapidly evolving markets.
The shift to cloud computing has resulted in businesses across all sectors embracing more efficient ways to manage their cloud infrastructure. In today’s business environment, business operations must be agile and scalable to keep up with competitors. IaC enables organisations to rapidly deploy and scale infrastructure to meet changing customer and market demands.
IaC: The Benefits
Numerous IaC benefits make it hard for organisations across all sectors to ignore, which explains why many companies are abandoning manual infrastructure management for IaC:
Time-saving
With IaC, infrastructure management can be automated, which reduces the need for time-consuming manual configuration and ongoing maintenance. Automating infrastructure with IaC improves organisational efficiency and frees up time for teams to spend on other projects.
Faster deployments (and less testing)
IaC also allows organisations to significantly increase deployment speeds compared to other infrastructure management methods. It enables organisations to easily replicate and reuse infrastructure resources across different environments, meaning infrastructure can be standardised and deployed consistently. The result? Much less time spent testing and troubleshooting! IaC is also useful when operating large amounts of resources, which is something enterprise-size companies have no shortage of.
Minimise human error
Another advantage of IaC compared to manual infrastructure management is the significant reduction in human error—it is a significant factor in IT outages. One study found that human error is responsible for 22 per cent of unplanned outages.
By automating infrastructure management tasks, the risk of manual mistakes is lowered significantly. The result is more stable and secure systems that experience less downtime, which benefits organisations and their customers.
Better collaboration
With IaC, development and operations teams work together on infrastructure configuration using the same set of tools and practices. This increases communication and transparency, breaking down the traditional silos between the two teams.
Terraform: A Powerful IaC Implementation Tool
Terraform is an open-source IaC tool that allows users to create and manage infrastructure on several cloud platforms using a declarative configuration language. The tool is popular because it is relatively easy to use when automating the provisioning of infrastructure resources.
Terraform has several advantages over more traditional infrastructure management methods:
Easy to use
One of the key advantages of Terraform is that it is easy to use compared to some infrastructure management tools. Terraform keeps track of the state of your infrastructure, so there’s no need to manage it manually. It also allows you to reuse code modules, making it easier for you to manage various infrastructure resources.
Open-source
Terraform is open-source, and there is a big community of users and developers who provide those in need with troubleshooting help when they require it.
Declarative
Terraform is also declarative, meaning that you describe the intended goal for your infrastructure, and the tool gets you there. This makes it easy to automate infrastructure.
Platform Agnostic
Terraform allows you to manage infrastructure on various cloud platforms, but it takes its extensibility further because it can also interact with any Software-as-a-service provider. There are hundreds of providers available for Terraform to use (available on the Terraform registry), making the tool incredibly versatile to use. It's also extensible to new ones. Anything with an API can have a provider built for it for terraform to manage.
Secure
Finally, Terraform is secure. The tool uses several security features to protect your infrastructure, including encryption to protect its configuration and state, access control to restrict access to users, and logs of infrastructure changes so you can track both authorised and unauthorised changes.
Terraform has several key features that make it a popular IaC tool. However, Ansible is also an excellent IaC implementation tool to consider. For a deeper dive into Ansible, read our recent article on the popular infrastructure management tool.
Final Thoughts
The ultra-competitive nature of the market has made IaC a strategic imperative for many organisations. By adopting IaC over manual infrastructure management, organisations can harness the power of automation, speed up vital deployments and minimise human error, which results in efficient infrastructure management.
Regarding tools for implementing IaC, Terraform stands out from its competitors. The tool is simple, customisable and agentless, giving users ultimate flexibility. For example, with Ansible, you have to tell the platform the steps you like it to take. In contrast, you tell Terraform the state you want the environment to be in, and Terraform handles the state it takes for you. By leveraging tools like Terraform and Ansible and implementing IaC, companies can stay agile, allowing them to respond quickly to the ever-changing demands of their customers and the wider markets.
There’s no doubt that IaC is a game changer for companies scrambling to keep up with the rapid pace of innovation and changing consumer preferences. By shifting to IaC and using powerful tools such as Terraform, companies can optimise infrastructure management processes, freeing up more time to focus on other strategic organisational changes to generate revenue.