Infrastructure as code is a paradigm that enables the management and automation of IT infrastructure configuration, often via profiles of popular Infrastructure as a Service systems. In this article, we will talk about some of the best tools helping you with implementing your infrastructure in code including CodeDeploy from AWS, Ansible, CohesiveFT with ZAP, TestInfra from Hashicorp and finally Terraform.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has seen exponential growth in 2016. According to Gartner, 77% of enterprises will be using IaC in 2017. IaC is a powerful tool but can be challenging to develop and adhere to. Below we’ll take a look at some of the best tools for developing and adhering to Infrastructure as Code in order to keep IT infrastructure in check.
Terraform
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. You can easily provision different environments using the same configuration and manage the full lifecycle of your desired infrastructure; thus reducing human errors and increasing automation in the infrastructure provisioning and management process
AWS CloudFormation
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 own resource providers in order to provision and manage the third-party application resources along with the native AWS resources.
The models and templates for CloudFormation are written in YAML or JSON format. You just need to code your desired infrastructure from scratch with the suitable template language and use the AWS CloudFormation to provision and manage the stack and resources that you have defined in the template. CloudFormation also uses Rollback Triggers to restore infrastructure stacks to a previously deployed state if errors are observed, to ensure that deployment and upgrading of infrastructure are achieved in a controlled manner.
Google Cloud Deployment Manager
Google Cloud Deployment Manager is an infrastructure deployment service provided by GCP to automate the creation, configuration, provisioning, and management of resources on 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. Deployment configurations are treated as code and those deployments can easily be repeated over and over again by maintaining consistency in their state
CloudFormation is a popular cloud infrastructure automation tool coming from the IaaS giant AWS. It enables organizations to easily create, deploy and manage the AWS resource stack using a template or a text file that acts as a single source of truth.
CloudFormation uses YAML or JSON. As it runs on the AWS infrastructure, you don’t have to worry about how it stores the infrastructure configuration. Templates are used to customize AWS stack, replicate and deploy apps in multiple environments.
Change Sets is an important feature that enables you to check what changes before instantiating a template. Nested Stacks is another important feature that enables you to easily manage complex stacks by encapsulating functional logic, groups, databases, etc. in the template. It means you don’t have to compare and check old and new templates before making any change.
Coming from Amazon AWS, CloudFormation enjoys certain benefits. AWS keeps updating its features and services and CloudFormation gets these updates as well. Moreover, AWS keeps improving CloudFormation which means users will get the latest features and best services.
Puppet is an enterprise-ready configuration management tool that enables administrators to define the desired state of the infrastructure via code. It is more robust and popular among CM tools with powerful interfaces, modules, and available actions. It is written in Ruby. Puppet uses a Domain Specific Language (DSL) to manage code via a declarative programming method and manages Linux and Windows environments.
Puppet uses a Client-server model wherein the server software is installed on the server while each managed machine contains the node software installation. It is a model-driven architecture. Compared with Ansible, puppet installation takes some time and involves complex configuration settings. It offers high scalability and availability by replicated data of the master to another server that again involves complex settings. The tool uses Puppet Forge which stores around 6000 modules. It uses a pull deployment model where the agents initiate the pull mode and regularly check for updates from the master.
Puppet GUI is highly intuitive and enables users to seamlessly monitor and manage the entire infrastructure from a central pane in real-time. It offers customizable reporting tools. The tool enjoys a large and mature community that is supportive. Puppet offers dedicated support and extensive Kbs on its website. Puppet is offered in two versions; Open-source edition and Puppet Enterprise edition.
Chef
Chef is a particularly popular IaC tool among CI/CD practitioners. The fact that Chef uses Ruby-based DSL is certainly a huge plus too. It supports “cookbook” versioning from the beginning and allows you to maintain a consistent configuration—even when the infrastructure needs to keep up with the rapid growth of the app it hosts.
Chef provides recipes and cookbooks at the heart of its configuration—these are self-styled appellations for templates and collections of templates that you can use out of the box. One cookbook should relate to a single task, but it can deliver a number of different server configurations based on the resources involved (e.g., a web application with a database will have two recipes, one for each part, stored together). Thanks to its support for cloud provisioning APIs, Chef also works really well with other IaC tools including Terraform as well as multiple other cloud environments.
Conclusion
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) refers to the process of using software language to describe changes in infrastructures. It is an approach that helps create clouds, containers, clusters and serverless environments. Once you get it right, it can be fully automated and helps make application deployment painless.