Benefits of Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

As you adopt modern technology powered by the cloud, managing infrastructure across environments becomes complex and challenging with manual processes. Infrastructure-as-a-Code is an amazing solution with automation features that are making waves.

The role of infrastructure

Modern applications are built with emerging technologies and powered by the cloud. Advanced software is becoming increasingly complex, and there is a need to simplify it wherever possible. Infrastructure is a fundamental aspect of a software development process. It is directly responsible for the stable running of the software application. The infrastructure, in this case, can consist of servers, load balancers, firewalls, and databases to container clusters.

Many businesses still rely on manual processes for setting up their Infrastructure, operation, and management. The issue with manual operations is the possibility of delays, errors, and discrepancies. Besides that, manual labor increases the costs of an organization. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) solves these challenges with automation. In this article, you can learn about Infrastructure as code and how it benefits organizations.

Modern applications are built with emerging technologies and powered by the cloud. Advanced software is becoming increasingly complex, and there is a need to simplify it wherever possible. Infrastructure is a fundamental aspect of a software development process. It is directly responsible for the stable running of the software application. The infrastructure, in this case, can consist of servers, load balancers, firewalls, and databases to container clusters.

Many businesses still rely on manual processes for setting up their Infrastructure, operation, and management. The issue with manual operations is the possibility of delays, errors, and discrepancies. Besides that, manual labor increases the costs of an organization. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) solves these challenges with automation. In this article, you can learn about Infrastructure as code and how it benefits organizations.

What is Infrastructure as Code?

Infrastructure as Code (popularly known as IaC) is a process of provisioning and managing Infrastructure by defining it as Code instead of the traditional manual process. This method enables developers to design and automatically deploy the infrastructure components required to support applications as they are being built, enhancing agility. Infrastructure as Code can handle more sophisticated and intricate operations instead of simple systems that automate IT activities. Business benefits from improved process automation by integrating Infrastructure with version control.

What are the problems with conventional Infrastructure?

The manual nature of traditional IT infrastructure management techniques can potentially result in human error and more significant expenses. Before deploying an application, infrastructure administrators manually configure the servers to fulfill the operating system and application requirements. 

Costs and resources are the primary disadvantages of the traditional strategy, as a business must engage specialists to conduct these tiresome yet sophisticated duties. Controlling these operations requires many specialists and management, which, in turn, increases corporate expenses and can lead to further internal organizational communication and overheads.

A manual infrastructure configuration is significantly slower than automated operations, resulting in delays and eventual application unavailability. Organizations lose crucial scalability, especially during peaks, and risk their applications being unavailable for extended duration. 

In addition, once an infrastructure-related issue arises, it becomes challenging to pinpoint the root cause. Without the continual monitoring and reporting that IaC technologies provide, professionals may devote much effort to locating the underlying cause, resulting in user churn and a negative reputation.

Why choose Infrastructure as Code?

Systems are getting complex with cloud integration. It is common for big enterprises to have hundreds of apps, each with its Infrastructure needs depending on design, purpose, traffic, and other factors. As the number of environments grows, so does the complexity of new deployments, as modifications to one stack can impact others.

The increasing complexity of modern systems, coupled with cloud migration, makes it necessary to adopt Infrastructure as Code. The general use of microservices requires the provision of distinct infrastructures for hundreds of tiny apps instead of a few large applications, which is possible through Infrastructure as Code’s automation capabilities. In the next section, you can learn some advantages of using Infrastructure as Code.

Benefits of Infrastructure as Code

Infrastructure as Code offers many advantages that improve business productivity. Using IaC can provide considerable benefits to your organization, ranging from cost savings and increased scalability to improved security and a disaster recovery solution. Here are some of the important ones:

• Increase in speed: Infrastructure as Code and its automation significantly accelerate the infrastructure configuration and setup processes. Developers can quickly execute scripts for configuring various infrastructure needs, - including development, deployment, testing, production, and more. Your employees can save time in complex configurations and setups that usually take longer

• Scalability: Combining cloud services with Infrastructure as Code technology allows businesses to provide the necessary scalability to keep their applications performing perfectly. Scalability is critical in today’s application development since its absence may impact application performance and damage brand reputation. 

• During peak seasons with heavy user traffic, the apps can have higher activity, leading to unavailability and delays. Automated scaling resolves this issue and enables you to expand and contract resource usage as required.

• Cost reduction: Cost saving is a significant advantage of IaC adoption. To begin with, by automating tasks, you will reduce your human resource expenditures. Hiring and onboarding a new employee are costly on their own. Costs become substantially higher when you include other human resources components like pension, taxes, compensation, and office equipment.

• Security: IaC, with its standards and automation, offers consistency and better security. The risk of unauthorized infrastructure changes gets minimized as changes are done in Code using IaC. The version control feature allows code reversal if required.

• Disaster Recovery: The version control feature provides disaster recovery options allowing developers to revert changes and restore a previous version. It is helpful in finding the root cause of a related issue in case of delays.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools

Terraform: Terraform is a leading Infrastructure as Code tool specialized in managing Infrastructure across popular platforms like AWS, Azure, Alibaba Cloud, Kubernetes, and others. The solution ensures the proper configuration setup by providing infrastructure provisioning and control across platforms.

Pulumi: Pulumi is another IaC solution with infrastructure setup and management capabilities. The essential advantage of this system is the variety of programming languages available, which includes Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, Go, and C#.

AWS CloudFormation: CloudFormation is a code-based technique for establishing AWS infrastructure. It enables you to model a set of connected AWS and third-party resources to provide them rapidly and reliably. AWS CloudFormation also has a way of managing resources throughout its existence.

Ansible: The Ansible configuration management tool has IaC capabilities if you prefer open-source alternatives. It provides comprehensive infrastructure provisioning features but lacks infrastructure management functions.

Wrapping up

Infrastructure as Code delivers standardization, security, consistency, and cost savings. It will save your organization time and money by simplifying and accelerating your infrastructure provisioning process. 

At CloudPanda.io, we can help you leverage IaC for your organization’s benefit with a variety of tools. Contact us today for a free consultation.