Modern app development is incomplete without managed services and Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC). Thanks to these two tools or technologies, the deployment and management of cloud resources have been simplified greatly. Together managed services and IaC offer developers a streamlined path to build scalable, flexible, and reliable systems.
What is Infrastructure-as-Code?
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is an immensely popular approach to managing and provisioning computer data center resources through machine-readable definition files instead of using manual configuration processes. IaC has radically changed the way IT infrastructure deployment takes place, including its management and maintenance.
IaC began gaining popularity in the early 2010s when the IT environment started getting increasingly complex. This raised a need for more efficient and repeatable infrastructure provisioning that did not exist earlier. Organizations began switching to automation to reduce human error and boost efficiency & productivity. IaC was the perfect answer to the need of the hour.
Infrastructure-as-Code is super useful for IT teams, especially developers. It can help them achieve consistency, reproducibility, and version control for their development environments smoothly. The risk of configuration drift, as a result, is significantly reduced. With IaC, developers can rest assured that environments will always be identical, making testing and deployment less stressful and a lot easier. It also makes provisioning of infrastructure quicker and more reliable. Overall, with IaC, one undoubtedly can accelerate the development and delivery of applications.
Commonly used IaC tools like Terraform, Ansible, and CloudFormation offer developers an opportunity to take a declarative approach to defining infrastructure. With this, developers can easily specify the desired state of their environment. IaC tools like the ones mentioned above are immensely useful in automating provisioning and managing resources. They contribute to reducing the need for manual configuration and work towards minimizing human error.
Challenges of using IaC
There is one major obstacle on this path of using Infrastructure-as-Code – the brittleness of the applications being developed, and this brittleness is growing. The true separation of concerns is also missing in the process. What does this mean?
Say you have an S3 bucket and no longer need it. Now, if you make a mistake, will it continue to exist in the project’s IaC even when it is no longer being referenced in the application code?
Now, if you need a new resource, as an application developer, would you need to reach out to automation engineers so the new requirement can be added to the IaC – meaning, an application change will also become an automation change?
If you make any changes to the services deployed in the IaC would it automatically trigger changes in the application code as well?
Do you find local tests to be insufficient when building a new application and end up testing the entire application again on the cloud to ensure everything works smoothly and seamlessly?
Does the smallest typo in a value lead to a breakdown incident for the application?
Are you limited by your organization’s policies, ending up using only certain templates or scaffolds to meet compliance?
Feels like familiar scenarios, don’t they?
Then maybe instead of Infrastructure-as-Code, you switch to Infrastructure-from-Code?
Or maybe you don’t use managed services at all, but that won’t be a very feasible or efficient option.
What is Infrastructure-from-Code?
Infrastructure-from-Code (IF-C) stands for a paradigm shift in IT management. IF-C has enabled the definition and provisioning of infrastructure resources through code. IF-C leverages declarative languages and enables organizations to decide & describe the desired state of their infrastructure. It also helps in automating the process of creating, configuring, and managing resources. Using IF-C, developers could no longer need manual configuration, thereby reducing errors, improving consistency, and accelerating the delivery of applications.
The concept of IF-C is not yet as popular or common as IaC but is slowly gaining ground. With the increasing complexity of IT environments and the undying need for more efficient and scalable infrastructure management, IF-C was a natural next step to go beyond IaC and address the commonly encountered challenges developers have been facing. Cloud computing and containerization are everywhere and all organizations seem to have embraced it now. It is only a matter of time before everyone wakes up to realize that IF-C is something they always needed but didn’t have to automate and manage the complex IT environments they usually encounter.
When creating applications with IF-C, during deployment, the cloud provider inspects the application code, and the provisioning of any required infrastructure is automatically taken care of by the cloud provider. Unlike the case of IaC, the developer need not explicitly define the infrastructure resources in separate files. As a result, there is much less code to write and inspect for the developers. Additionally, there is no longer an indispensable need to learn IaC languages like CloudFormation. This can be huge for someone new to Serverless or just someone looking to be more efficient and save time.
Infrastructure-from-Code is undoubtedly the future of application development beyond Infrastructure-as-Code. But there are still many years before it becomes a standard thing like IaC is now. What we know for certain is that IF-C can help solve a lot of challenges developers face with IaC.
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