“What is Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and why does it hold significance?”
Imagine managing your computer setup like a recipe book instead of clicking through menus or typing commands each time. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is just that – a way to handle your tech infrastructure using configuration files. It lets you create, modify, and oversee your setup reliably and safely, all through simple text files. These files can be versioned, shared, and reused, making it easier to keep things consistent and repeatable, like sharing a favorite recipe with others.

Let’s consider the old-school way of managing infrastructure, like using Proxmox in a private data center. In the traditional process, if you needed something from the infrastructure, you’d create a ticket. Then, someone on the other side of that ticketing system would go into a management portal or admin console, clicking their way through to set up the requested piece of infrastructure.
This system worked fine when dealing with a small amount of infrastructure or when changes to my setup were infrequent. Many private data centers followed this pattern, where a virtual machine might stay active for months to years, and the scale of deployment was manageable enough to handle manual pointing, clicking, and administration of these systems.

Now, as we shift gears, there are a couple of significant changes:

First, we’re moving into a cloud environment (400+ cloud available i.e Amazon Web Services (AWS), GCP, Microsoft Azure, and many more) that relies heavily on APIs. That’s a major shift.

The second change is the increased flexibility of our infrastructure. Instead of resources sticking around for months to years, now it’s more like days to weeks in terms of their lifespan.”

The scale of our infrastructure has grown significantly. Instead of just a few large instances, we now have numerous smaller instances. This means there’s a lot more to set up, and the nature of this infrastructure is cyclical. We might need to scale up to manage heavy traffic on a busy day and then scale down at night to save costs. Unlike owning hardware with fixed costs and depreciation, we’re now paying for usage by the hour. So, it’s smart to only use the infrastructure when needed, and having this flexibility is crucial.

When you’re making these adjustments, the idea of filing a thousand tickets every morning to ramp up to peak capacity, and then filing another thousand at night to scale back down, while manually handling all of this, becomes quite daunting. The challenge lies in figuring out how to operationalize this in a reliable and error-resistant way. How can we ensure it’s both dependable and resilient, while minimizing the chance of human error?

There’s a shift in the dynamics of our infrastructure. The essence of infrastructure as code lies in capturing the processes—things we used to manually achieve by pointing and clicking—in a coded form. This way, whether I need to do it once, ten times, or a thousand times, I can automate the process. Each morning, I can run a AI based script to decide to bring up a thousand machines, and each evening, I can use the same AI script to scale it back down to our evening size.

I can not only automate the process, but since I’ve transformed it into a coded form, I can now store it in version control (GitHub) , giving me versioning capabilities. This means I can track changes incrementally, understanding who made what modifications and how my infrastructure is defined at any moment. It provides a level of transparency and documentation that is often missing in traditional point-and-click environments. Instead of relying on an oral tradition to understand configurations, everything is now documented and visible

Our certified cloudEQ Terraform engineers specialize in Infrastructure as Code. They interpret and deploy code to create optimal infrastructure tailored to your business needs on demand. Reach out to us for more information, and we’d be delighted to assist you.