Infrastructure as Code (IAC) is an automation technique for managing your infrastructure and is important for streamlining app development and other code-based projects. With this automation, you reduce the the number of DevOps engineers to manage your infrastructure and project. However, it’s a large upfront investment that isn’t applicable for every app. Let’s first go over why you wouldn’t use IAC.
When Infrastructure as Code Isn’t Needed
IAC shouldn’t be a priority for a proof of concept (POC) or a smaller and simpler application. These simpler applications can be killed at any moment so limit their resource allocation. Your current team should easily maintain and scale these smaller application infrastructures via the UI console of a cloud provider, such as AWS. They can also manage the infrastructure through your cloud provider’s command line interface and bash or similar scripts.
Although these manual approaches require less initial work, they do require your app development team to routinely manage the infrastructure to keep your mobile and web apps running. Infrastructure fixes can get messy so make sure they are tested on a dev or staging environment before going live.
Use Infrastructure as Code If You’re Facing These Challenges
If you’ve heard your team complaining about the following, then it’s definitely time to consider an IAC for your application:
- Our team has trouble understanding/agreeing on our current infrastructure’s setup and configuration.
- We deploy code constantly but spend an unhealthy amount of time determining the order of the infrastructure’s deployment.
- We spend a lot of time copying and reusing our code in different projects and environments.
- Developers dedicate a lot of time spinning up dev environments and killing them for testing purposes.
- We make a lot of mistakes in provisioning and managing our infrastructure.
- The infrastructure setup is manually configured, and it takes a lot of time to confirm that it’s live and working.
- Our team spends too much time setting up the infrastructure and not enough building out core functionality.
- Developers are tired of manual methods to track and manage infrastructure changes.
- Our regulatory compliance for the infrastructure is to pray that QA and UAT pass.
- The wrong people have access to our protected environments.
Obviously, some of these issues are more serious than others. The litmus test for IAC is whether your team has the bandwidth to manage every aspect of your infrastructure manually. Therefore, check with your team to confirm whether it’s time for IAC or consult with a migration expert, like Uplancer, to get started with your IAC pipeline!
Tools for Infrastructure as Code
If you’re already thinking we need IAC, there are a few considerations you’ll need to make. The first is the breadth of the implementation. Do you need a full or partial implementation? With full, you’re changing every part of your infrastructure to be managed by code. And with partial, you’re implementing IAC on core services that would benefit from it the most.
*Note that IAC is not a one-size-fits-all approach and certainly depends on your organizational needs.
Once you’ve confirmed the breadth, second is the depth. Are you looking for a configuration-based or code-based tool? A configuration-based tool is as simple as it sounds; you set it up with limited code and apply standardized configurations to manage your infrastructure. Code-based tools, on the other hand, allow you to control your IAC more. You can assign custom configurations as needed.
The final consideration are the providers and their varying IAC offerings, such as CDK, templates, and serverless frameworks. You’ll also find the equivalent implementations through other providers like Azure, GCP, and Terraform. Choosing the right one has their own cost benefits and must be weighed by your app development team. Or you can consult with an Uplancer migration expert to determine which tool is most compatible with your tech stack!
The Bottom Line / TLDR
If your team spends too much time fighting with your infrastructure instead of on app development or other tasks, it’s time to help them. Take an IAC approach to your infrastructure and free them up for core development work. Let’s discuss your infrastructure problems and how IAC can help!
