Why is infrastructure-as-code important?
1. Transition to the cloud
One trend, of course, is the ongoing migration to the cloud. More and more businesses are moving workloads from on-premises infrastructure to cloud environments.
It is worth noting the scope of this transformation. The term “cloud environments” is more broad than many people believe. Hyper-scaler clouds, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure, may come to mind first, but there is so much more to cloud architecture.
- Specialized cloud providers
- On-premises data centers run private cloud technologies like VMware vSphere.
- Modern SaaS infrastructure firms such as Cloudflare, Snowflake, Confluent, Datadog, New Relic, and many others
- Other cloud-based assets, such as Auth0, GitLab, and GitHub
All of these cloud environments can be provided or controlled via APIs, making them manageable with infrastructure as code tools.
2. Cloud modernization
The second trend is cloud modernization. At first look, this may appear to be redundant with the first trend, the ongoing transfer to the cloud. However, after enterprises have transitioned to the cloud, they tend to look for ways to optimize the value they derive from their cloud environment. This typically entails implementing technologies like serverless, containers, and Kubernetes. In certain circumstances, cloud modernization entails leveraging managed services to shift some of the heavy lifting to the cloud provider. In other circumstances, cloud modernization entails making more use of ephemeral, stateless workloads that persist for a limited time before being deactivated. When used appropriately, all of these approaches allow teams to provide value faster. These technologies and services necessitate a more detailed infrastructure management approach. IaC is well-suited to combining all of the primitives provided by the cloud provider into business-oriented solutions.
3. Frequent infrastructural modifications
Finally, the pace of change in a company’s infrastructure is increasing. Cloud adoption and modernization have contributed to an increase in the rate of change. However, there is a third reason: enterprises are discovering that leveraging the cloud’s intrinsic elasticity allows them to move faster.
For teams managing tens or hundreds of cloud services that change every few months, managing infrastructure through scripts or interactive means (such as a UI or a CLI) may still be feasible. More typically, teams are responsible for managing thousands or tens of thousands of resources that vary on a daily or even hourly basis. Embracing automation through infrastructure as code is the only way to manage that level of complexity.
Infrastructure As Code Using Pulumi
Infrastructure as code (IaC) is a method for automating the provisioning and administration of infrastructure. Infrastructure as code is fundamentally about applying software engineering principles, techniques, and tools to cloud infrastructure.
Prior to infrastructure as code, infrastructure was (and still is!) provisioned in a variety of ways, including pointing and clicking in a user interface (UI), running commands via a command-line interface (CLI), running batch scripts, and using configuration management tools that were not designed for cloud infrastructure. Each of these approaches has limitations; interactive methods including a UI or a CLI frequently cause issues with repeatability and consistency, whereas batch scripts or configuration management systems may be unable to manage infrastructure declaratively. Modern approaches leverage platforms like Pulumi to embrace and assist the entire software engineering lifecycle.