The infrastructure as code has appeared in our IS to reconcile or revolutionize both the dev and the ops, let's discover here the key factors of success of this method.
... subject to close cooperation at the outset
Infrastructure as Code is revolutionizing software engineering by bringing consistency between environments that was previously missing in versioning and testing. That saidIaC also brings with it a transformation of methods, which implies a certain amount of caution.However, IaC also entails a transformation of methods, which implies a certain amount of caution and should not make us forget the essential role of infrastructure engineers, to the benefit of development teams.
L'IaCfaster and better
The objective of Infrastructure as Code or IaC is to codify the infrastructure made available to the company's applications. In particular, it allows the same technical envelope to be reproduced in an automated way, and continuously if necessary, on all useful environments (development, integration, pre-production or production environments).
Basically, the first advantage of IaC and the standardization it allows is that it considerably accelerates the deployment of environments while guaranteeing their consistency.
This race for speed can sometimes leave one wondering. Ten years ago, speed was already the promise of Cloud through a PaaS offering predefined modeling. If, indeed, the IT department has been able to transform its methods in depth, satisfying both its development teams and the business, we must recognize that the processes could still be improved.
Soon, through DevOps, the problem of identical replications of environments arose, and through them, the necessary resource description documents, the explanations to be given to the Ops teams on the choices made and the eternal discussions that ensue. In short, multiple grains of sand that regularly came to stop the machine.
IaC results in development teams having end-to-end control of operations, allowing them to code all the desired infrastructure for the applications they create. And much more.
Use cases of Infrastructure as Code with dev and ops
In a DevOps process, rapid deployment of new applications is therefore primarily dependent on the company's ability to automate resources (and their provisioning) and create consistent environments.
Beyond that, companies can find many use cases.
Through the concept of microservices in containers, the company can benefit from horizontal flexibility. This will be the case whenever an application that is usually not very busy becomes so over a given period. A recurring event can contribute to this type of situation (sporting event, election period, etc.). IaC allows the production environment to be reproduced multiple times in order to absorb peaks in traffic, very easily and in an extremely short period of time.
Infrastructure as Code will also be of great interest in situations of version upgrades, to take advantage of a full replicated production environment during the testing or production phase.
The same benefits of consistency and speed will be found when it comes to creating training environments, which you want to parallelize to accommodate multiple languages.
This ability to quickly create identical environments is coupled with the ability to automatically destroy resources. For all the companies that have suffered from excessive consumption of Cloud, the automatic deletion of environments is perhaps the key point in choosing IaC. In any case, it is a cornerstone of a FinOps strategy, especially for large consumers Cloud and Cloud hybrid.
The accessibility of Infrastructure as Code in the enterprise for dev and ops
IaC is aimed at companies that are at least partially mature in Cloud , if only because it involves a new way of thinking about infrastructure. That said, the question may arise of wanting to automate all of its environments en masse. While early adoption of new technologies is not the favorite sport of French companies, some are more adventurous than others.
However, it is advisable to focus only on projects and not on environments already created. While the transition to IaC on existing systems is not unfeasible on paper, the principle of idempotence, i.e., the definition of the target environment at the heart of IaC, assumes that the software environment (e.g., Terraform) is informed of all the resources made available. This means modeling the entire asset base (network, storage, server, etc.) as a basic building block that can be used in the IaC tool. And this can be a lot of work.
If the risk of failure is high on the existing, it is not the same for future environments. However, there are a few good collaborative practices that we tend to neglect.
The end of teamwork?
With IaC, one might think that Dev teams become omnipotent, an idea underpinned by automatic reproducibility, allowing them to free themselves from the system engineer, the database administrator and the network and storage administrator. It's true that developers can now do everything on their own at Cloud , but is that really such a good idea?
On the one hand, the initial planning of an Infrastructure as a Service requires a certain amount of discussion with all the stakeholders of an IT infrastructure, or at least a detailed knowledge of the construction of the modules that will be available off the shelf and that will then compose the Terraform (if this is the tool chosen).
On the other hand, few companies today have not developed specific policies that must be followed regardless of the infrastructure. In other words, it will be up to developers to take a close look at all the rules enacted in the name of system and data protection before defining their environments.
As a result, IaC cannot do without a fully collective initial work, involving all the administrators concerned, databases, storage, networks and application architects, in terms of knowledge that is as basic as it is essential. This is why, contrary to what IaC suggests, it is important that the responsibility for the introduction of these solutions is taken on by the infrastructure manager, who is best able to bring together all the skills required during the launch phases.
