Infrastructure as Code Concepts

External

• https://infrastructure-as-code.com

Internal

• Infrastructure as Code
• Infrastructure Concepts

Overview

Infrastructure is not something you build and forget, in requires constant change: fixing, updating and improving. Infrastructure as Code is a set of technology and engineering practices aimed at delivering change more frequently (or, some would say continuously), quickly and reliably, while improving the overall quality of the system at the same time. Trading speed for quality is a false dichotomy. Used correctly, Infrastructure as Code embeds speed, quality, reliability and compliance into the process of making changes. Changing infrastructure becomes safer. Infrastructure as Code is based on practices from software development, especially test driven development, continuous integration and continuous delivery.

The capability to make changes frequently and reliably is correlated with organizational success (Accelerate by Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble and Gene Kim). Changes include adding new services, such as a new database, upgrades, increase of resources to keep up with load, change and tune underlying application runtimes for diagnosis and performance reasons, security patches.

Core Practices

Define Everything as Code

Code can be versioned and compared, it can benefit from lessons learned in software design patterns, principles and techniques such as test driven development, continuous integration, continuous delivery or refactoring.

Continuously Test and Deliver

Continuously testing small pieces encourages a modular, loosely coupled design.

Build Small, Simple, Loosely Coupled Pieces that Can Be Changed Independently

Microservices fall into this category.

Stack

Collection of infrastructure resources provisioned from cloud platforms.