Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the process of configuring and managing the infrastructure through a descriptive model. It is all about treating your infrastructure configuration and provisioning in the same way you treat your application source code. The configuration modules are typically stored in version control systems in very well-documented code formats which provides greater accuracy, reduces errors, and increases speed and consistency.
IAC is one of the most important DevOps practices used in conjunction with continuous delivery. The benefits that lead many businesses to migrate to IAC are changeless infrastructure, an increase in the speed of delivery, scalability, cost savings, and risk mitigation.
HashiCorp Terraform is the most popular and open-source tool for infrastructure automation. It helps in configuring, provisioning, and managing the infrastructure as code. With terraform, you can easily plan and create IaC across multiple infrastructure providers with the same workflow. It uses the declarative approach to define the required infrastructure as code.
Terraform allows users to have a pre-execution check to validate whether the configurations meet the result expectations or not, before updating or provisioning the infrastructure. It enables users to have their desired infrastructure across multiple cloud providers through a single and consistent CLI workflow.
Provision consistent testing, staging, and production environments with the same configuration.
Provision infrastructure across 300+ public clouds and services using a single workflow.
Reduce human error and increase automation by provisioning infrastructure as code.
Ansible was developed by RedHat with an idea to promote simplicity. It contributes towards IT modernization and helps DevOps teams to have faster, more reliable, and coordinated application deployments. You can easily establish multiple identical environments with security baselines without having to worry about the fulfillment of compliance requirements. As far as business is concerned, Ansible brings in a competitive advantage by providing time for bringing in innovation and strategy within the organization and aligning IT with the business needs.
Ansible is considered to be the simplest way to automate the provision, configuration, and management of applications and IT infrastructure. Ansible enables users to execute playbooks to create and manage the required infrastructure resources. It does not use agents and can connect to servers and run commands over SSH.
Ansible operates by connecting your nodes and pushing out Ansible modules to them. It is highly efficient and requires no databases, servers, or daemons.
Ansible requires no additional agents or security infrastructure and can be used for multi-tiered deployments as efficiently as possible. It is one of the simplest IT automation technology in the industry.
Ansible enables you to easily deploy multi-tier applications reliably and consistently from a single framework. The Ansible playbook system helps you in controlling installations, upgrades, and regular management.
With Ansible, you can centrally govern and monitor disparate systems and workloads. Through Ansible Tower you control infrastructure, access a visual dashboard, and complete job scheduling and inventory management.
AWS CloudFormation is an embedded IaC tool within the AWS cloud platform that provides you with an easy way to quickly and efficiently provision and manage a collection of multiple related AWS and even third-party resources using Infrastructure as Code. It allows you to implement all the required best practices of DevOps and GitOps.
With CloudFormation, you can easily manage the scaling of your resources and even automate further resource management by integrating CloudFormation with other required AWS resources. Besides this, AWS CloudFormation also allows you to use its open-source CLI to build your resource providers to provision and manage the third-party application resources along with the native AWS resources.
Azure Resource Manager is the service provided for the deployment and management of Azure resources. It is an Azure-specific IaC tool that allows resources to be deployed, maintained, and tracked in a single collective action rather than individually. It natively incorporates Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) into the resource management mechanism to allow users to apply control of access to all resources within a resource category.
Resource Manager allows you to use declarative templates instead of scripts to manage your infrastructure. With Azure resource manager, you can easily redeploy your infrastructure solution multiple times throughout the application development lifecycle by effortlessly maintaining consistency in the state.
Google Cloud Deployment Manager is an infrastructure deployment service provided by GCP to automate the creation, configuration, provisioning, and management of resources on the Google Cloud Platform. You can easily create a set of Google cloud resources and then manage them conveniently as a single unit. Using YAML or Python, you can build models, preview what changes will be made before deploying, and view your deployments in a console user interface.
This Infrastructure as Code tool uses a declarative language approach to specify what the configuration is supposed to be and let the system figure out the rest. Google Cloud Deployment Manager provides simultaneous deployments of many resources at once, controls the order of resource creation, and creates resource definition dependencies too.
Chef can be counted among the industry’s most notable IaC tools. Chef uses the procedural style language wherein the user has to write the code and step-by-step specify the way to achieve the desired state. It is dependent on the user for the determination of an optimal deployment process. Using its Ruby-based DSL, Chef allows you to create recipes and cookbooks. These recipes and cookbooks specify the exact steps required to achieve the desired configuration of your applications and utilities on existing servers.
This infrastructure management tool highly focuses on the deployment and modeling of a scalable and secure infrastructure automation process across any desired environment. With Chef, DevOps teams can provision and deploy on-demand infrastructure with ease.
Puppet is yet another open-source configuration management tool that is most commonly used to pull the strings on several application servers at once. It also uses a Ruby-based DSL-like chef, where you can describe your infrastructure’s desired end state. The primary difference between Puppet and Chef is that it uses a declarative approach, where you just have to decide, how the configurations you want look like, and then Puppet finds out how to get there.
Puppet is referred to a set of IAC tools that are used to deliver your infrastructures quickly and on a secure scale. It offers a wide group of developers who have built modules that help extend the functionality of the software.
SaltStack is an open-source configuration management tool based on Python that offers a simple solution for provisioning, deploying, and configuring infrastructure on any platform at a very fast rate.
SaltStack focuses on the automation of infrastructure, security, and network within the organization. It is an easy-to-use IaC tool that proves to be very useful during the mitigation and remediation of common infrastructure issues. It is a secure and cost-efficient IaC solution that provides automation and orchestration and reduces manual effort. It can automatically detect problems with event triggers and return to the desired state if required.
Vagrant is yet another one of the best IaC tools, developed by the Terraform creators, HashiCorp. The difference is that Vagrant focuses on building computing environments that use a limited number of virtual machines, rather than massive cloud infrastructure environments that can span hundreds or thousands of servers over several cloud providers.
HashiCorp Vagrant is a simple, yet powerful tool that is focused on making development environments easier. It promotes the use of unified workflows by leveraging the creation of declarative configuration files containing all the required configuration details. It enforces state consistency across environments and supports integration with existing configuration management tools like Puppet, Chef, SaltStack, Ansible, etc.
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