What are the benefits of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Terraform?
What is Infrastructure as Code (IaC)?
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a concept in which the provision and management of IT infrastructure resources is automated by code instead of being carried out manually. Instead of setting up and configuring physical or virtual servers, network configurations, databases and other infrastructure components by hand, the entire infrastructure is described using text files.
Why does Infrastructure as Code make sense?
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) offers a variety of benefits that increase both the efficiency and reliability of IT organisations. The main objectives and benefits include:
Automation and fast recovery
IaC enables the automation of routine tasks, saving time and reducing human error. This leads to faster and more reliable provisioning of infrastructure resources. In the event of an outage, developers and DevOps teams can quickly deploy new instances or rebuild existing instances, reducing web application recovery time.
Consistency and reproducible environments
Using the same code to set up and configure environments ensures that infrastructure is deployed consistently, minimizing inconsistencies and configuration errors. The infrastructure defined as code ensures that restored environments conform exactly to the defined specifications, further reducing the risk of inconsistencies.
Scalability
The automation of provisioning processes allows resources to be scaled quickly and easily to meet the company's requirements. In addition, IaC enables the flexible adjustment of infrastructure capacity to cope with additional data traffic or to absorb the effects of outages.
Documentation
The infrastructure code serves as a clear and transparent documentation of the existing resources and their configuration, which facilitates collaboration and maintenance.
Repeatability, portability and rollback capability
Infrastructure configurations can be easily reproduced and ported between different environments or cloud platforms. In the event of failures caused by recent changes, the versioning of the infrastructure code enables a quick rollback to a stable configuration.
Automated tests and validations
The integration of automated testing and validation into the deployment process helps to identify and resolve potential problems at an early stage, improving the stability and reliability of applications and minimizing downtime.
What is Terraform?
Terraform is an open source tool from HashiCorp for the automation and management of infrastructures. It allows developers to describe infrastructures declaratively in configuration files to define the desired state without having to worry about implementation details. Terraform manages the state of the infrastructure in a state file, supports modular and reusable configurations and offers cross-platform management for cloud and on-premise platforms such as AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Other features include planning and previewing changes, a strong community and comprehensive ecosystem, easy integration into existing workflows and a standardized user interface.
Terraform @Sitewerk
At Sitewerk, we use Terraform to efficiently initialize and manage the infrastructure on Azure for customer and internal projects. A key element of our implementation is the use of the Azure backend to store Terraform states. This allows us to store the states securely and accessibly on Azure so that team members can easily access the current state of the infrastructure from different devices. The seamless integration of Terraform with Azure supports the use of all common Azure services, enabling us to efficiently design and manage complex and scalable cloud infrastructures. The combination of Terraform and Azure thus forms the backbone of our agile and secure infrastructure development.
Conclusion
The Infrastructure as Code (IaC) concept helps to improve the agility, reliability and efficiency of IT organizations by automating and standardizing the manual processes involved in deploying and managing infrastructure. It is an important component of modern DevOps practices and cloud-based IT infrastructures.