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Is Infrastructure-as-Code a key to success?
Being in the recruitment world of DevOps, we see new terms & buzzwords come and go, though Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is one that has held strong and is an essential aspect of many companies DevOps function.
What is it?
As hinted in its title, Infrastructure as Code is the practice of automatically managing the Ops environment, in the same way as applications or other code for general release. It effectively blurs the line between what is the app and what is the environment (drawing parallels with how DevOps is in general merging the worlds of devs and ops).
Why has Infrastructure as Code proved to be so popular? And why has it revolutionised the way IT teams work?
It’s proven to be a key attribute in enabling best practices in DevOps to flourish. With Devs becoming more involved in defining configuration and Ops people being involved in the development process earlier on.
For enterprise companies adopting Public Cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), Infrastructure-as-Code becomes a prerequisite for other DevOps practices to prosper and ultimately a viable DevOps culture to be formed.
How does Infrastructure as Code benefit a company?
Speed is a key factor
Very simply speaking, using tools such as Puppet, Terraform, Ansible and Salt, speeds up and simplifies provisioning and configuring systems.
Security
As IaC promotes consistency between systems and environments (Testing & Production), standardising configurations and keeping configuration drift to a small scale, reduces the chance of attackers finding points of vulnerability. Plus ultimately if things are quicker, vulnerabilities can be addressed and patched quicker preventing more damage being done.
Cost
The improved efficiency and speed of the platform, leads to reduced costs (time is money).
So... Is Infrastructure as Code a key to success?
One would have to agree that without it, it would be near impossible for DevOps to triumph and we can all agree that DevOps is the present and future!
Written by Elliot Wilson
Added 4-Sep-2017