We completed the previous activity with a step illustrating the benefits of configuration management. In this activity on deployment and configuration, we will start off with a step covering environment deployment.

Infrastructure As Code

If you’ve ever received a middle-of-the-night emergency support call because of a crashed server, you know the pain of searching through multiple spreadsheets, or even your memory, to access the manual steps of setting up a new machine from scratch.

There is also an age-old difficulty of keeping the development and production environments consistent. An easier way to remove the possibility of human error when initializing machines and treat environments like code so that they are stood up from a single consistent definition is to use Infrastructure as Code.

A common analogy for using Infrastructure as Code is the distinction between owning pets and cattle. When you own pets, you give them names, you treat them individually, and if something bad happens to them, you care a lot. If you have a herd of cattle, you might still name them, but you treat them as a herd. In infrastructure terms, without treating environments as code, there might be severe implications if a machine crashes and you need to replace it (pets). If you use Infrastructure as Code, if a machine goes down, you can just spin up another machine with no issues (cattle).

When designing scripts or definitions for Infrastructure as Code (IaC), it’s important to make sure that the code and tools are set up to be idempotent, or able to run multiple times without error and with consistency.

Infrastructure as Code can also be set up with developers’ help because many tools offer the ability to write code in familiar programming languages, even ones as simple as JavaScript Object Notification (JSON) definitions. Some examples of common tools you use can in order to work with Infrastructure as Code are Vagrant, Ansible, Puppet, Chef, Docker, Microsoft Windows PowerShell DSC, and cloud-provided tools such as Azure Resource Management templates.

The following table lists the major differences between manual deployment and Infrastructure as Code:

Join the discussion

Have you encountered any of the issues mentioned in relation to manual deployment? What workarounds did your team come up to deal with this?

Use the discussion section below and let us know your thoughts. Try to respond to at least one other post and once you’re happy with your contribution, click the Mark as complete button to check the step off, then you can move to the next step.