When I see the automation of Infrastructure as Code work throughout the whole process I get a warm feeling in my body and when you can share this automation so that everyone can benefit from it, that’s when the magic happens. Imagine the enormous feeling of well being and power when your entire Nextcloud environment is deployed in a highly available fashion, in just minutes, based on code which can be reused, modified and shared. No more having to manually wade through service providers web GUIs, no more repetition of thousands of commands, but just one, source repository, which can be reused time and time again.
What Is Infrastructure as Code?
IaC is the label of a technique and the process of managing and provisioning data centers through machine-readable code. Also in respect to how you handle code it needs to be committed to a version control system. You should have code reviews, the code should go through testing and CI/CD tools which deploys ideally all the way to production.
Why Infrastructure as Code?
The point of IaC is to have a desired state of the infrastructure that is well defined, documented, version controlled and replicable. Add CI/CD, backups and configuration management to this and you can get the automation, verification, testing and disaster recovery.
Through automation you also remove repetitive and tedious tasks which are prone to human error.
Why not do it manually as we’ve always done.
Because it’s expensive to have someone who will be doing this day in and day out. Not to mention dead boring and very error prone. When the environment suddenly does not work, you need to spend time troubleshooting. And in the end it’s going to be pretty slow.
Scalability will be heavily dependent on personnel, whereas IaC setups would allow for much larger infrastructure configurations to be managed from a single point.
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Tell me moreAdvantages of IaC
Fast. Automated with the same result every time.
When you have everything automated you can fail forward quickly if you are not dependent on HA. Infrastructure is a lot easier to rebuild than to repair.
Repeatability, each execution should provide the same output. In essence this is the beauty of IaC - the element of predictability is transferred into the management of your infrastructure resources.
Traceability, changes are tracked in version control. Results become predictable and from an audit point of view - the desired state is always recorded. Any anomalies are easily spotted, preventing resources from being forgotten or “used for other purposes” than intended