What two components could you use to implement a “infrastructure as code” deployment?

Platform products • Red Hat Enterprise Linux A flexible, stable operating system to support hybrid cloud innovation. • Red Hat OpenShift A container platform to build, modernize, and deploy applications at scale. • Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform A foundation for implementing enterprise-wide automation. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the managing and provisioning of infrastructure through code instead of through manual processes. With IaC, configuration files are created that contain your infrastructure specifications, which makes it easier to edit and distribute configurations. It also ensures that you provision the same environment every time. By codifying and documenting your configuration specifications, IaC aids Version control is an important part of IaC, and your configuration files should be under source control just like any other software source code file. Deploying your infrastructure as code also means that you can divide your Automating ®Ansible ® AutomationPlatform, can do it for you. There are 2 ways to approach IaC: declarative or imperative. A declarative approach defines the desired state of the system, including what resources you need and any properties they should have, and an IaC tool will configure it for you. A declarative approach also keeps a list of the current state of your system objects, which makes taking down the infrastructure simpler to manage. An imperative approach instead defines the specific commands needed to achieve the desired ...

As IT organizations wrap their heads around infrastructure as code. It's an important term to understand because it's one of the essential elements of managing infrastructure at scale, and it's also at the very core of DevOps. Table of Contents • • • • • What is Infrastructure as Code? Infrastructure as code (IaC) is the practice of treating infrastructure as if it were code — just like software. Infrastructure as code enables organizations to automate tasks and processes that would otherwise be done manually, like managing infrastructure and provisioning resources. Treating infrastructure as if it were code lets you adopt powerful practices that have been used by software developers for years, and with great success — practices that include version control, peer review, automated testing, release tagging, release promotion, and continuous delivery. The older methods of infrastructure management — manual processes and documentation, brittle single-purpose scripts, and graphical user interface based tools — each had their uses in the past. Today, though, with the perpetual need to scale infrastructure, adoption of ephemeral infrastructure, and greater application system complexity, new ways of keeping things under control are needed. The wide adoption of virtualization and self-service cloud infrastructure has shifted the bottleneck from allocating servers to configuring them. Where it used to take weeks or months to allocate a server, now it can be done in a minute or two....

In the day of modern computing, repeatability, auditability, and simplicity are core tenets of many flourishing tech companies. Application code is stored in Git or SVN, and code reviews are performed. Deployments happen in an automated fashion, enabling developers to move software and features to 'done,' thereby delivering value to whomever the customers are. For the longest time, infrastructure was left out of this practice. We managed servers manually in our data centers until configuration management and infrastructure as code (IaC) was introduced. Today, most of the world's infrastructure is being hosted in data centers owned by cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure. As we launch new infrastructure, we're actually interacting with robust APIs behind the scenes that each platform provides. This opens the door to a totally new paradigm. Infrastructure can be deployed and configured through API calls, which provides a gap for Infrastructure as Code Providers. What is Infrastructure as Code (IaC)? Now that we understand the progression of how infrastructure is managed by businesses, let's talk about what Infrastructure as Code is, exactly. Just as we check our application code into Git repos, which serves as the source of truth for all things, we can describe the shape and characteristics of our cloud infrastructure using code. In Terraform, this means writing HCL ( When infrastructure changes are desired, one...

Published: 25 Nov 2020 Developers have made containers, serverless functions and microservices the foundation of modern, cloud-native applications for many reasons -- but operational simplicity isn't one of them. The fragmentation of monolithic client-server or web-based systems into numerous microservices containers and cloud functions multiplies the number of components that IT staff must configure, deploy, update and monitor. The underlying factors that compelled this shift to such a swarm of executables are standardization, integration and automation. Standardization enables developers to reuse the same code, image or template countless times with little effort. Integration enables processes to span software development to resource deployment. Automation allows these integrated, standardized components to be processed through software development and cloud operations pipelines, eliminating manual intervention and inadvertent mistakes. Many labels and buzzwords describe such automated pipelines, but they can be boiled down to three categories: • • DevOps pipeline , or CI/CD pipeline, which defines the particular automation tools used to take application code from a source code repository to a deployable executable or cloud function. • GitOps, which uses the Git source code management system to write applications, build pipelines, provision and manage resources (particularly Kubernetes clusters) and deploy applications. What's in a DevOps or IaC pipeline? End-to-end auto...

Imagine a large-scale IT infrastructure made up of networks, databases, servers, storage, operating systems, and other elements. How do you provision, configure, manage, and scale up these various elements on-demand? Traditionally, system administrators, often a dedicated team of specialists, manually performed these tasks as and when the need arose. Consequently, resource provisioning used to be a complex task that “wasn’t” characterized by responsiveness. Agility, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness all came at the cost of each other in such an environment. IaC makes it possible for organizations to automate infrastructure provisioning and scaling, which accelerates the speed at which cloud applications are developed, deployed, and scaled at a reduced cost. What is Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) and How Does it Work? Infrastructure as Code relies on machine-readable definition files that use high-level descriptive coding language to automate IT infrastructure provisioning. Human intervention is minimized, if not eliminated entirely, and developers can focus on the application development and deployment rather than its resource needs. IaC borrows software development practices to automate resource provisioning. Whenever there are changes in resource allocation and provisioning strategies, the changes are made to the definition files and rolled out to systems through unattended processes, albeit after thorough validation. So, humans do not manually provision or configure the...

Traditionally, infrastructure management was a manual process. But the rise of cloud computing and virtualization has made Infrastructure as Code (IaC) a popular approach to infrastructure management. This blog post will discuss Infrastructure as Code, its benefits, how it works, its best practices, the challenges associated with using it, and more. Let’s get started. Table of Contents • • • Increased consistency and repeatability • Collaboration and version control • Cost management • Idempotency • Security and Compliance • • Mutable vs Immutable Infrastructure • Terraform • Ansible • Kubernetes • AWS CloudFormation • • • • Version control and continuous integration • Testing and validation • Documentation and organization • Automation and orchestration • • A steep learning curve • The complexity of infrastructure • A cultural shift in the organization • What is Infrastructure as Code? Infrastructure as code (IaC) is defined as the continuous practice of using programming languages and machine-readable code to manage and configure computing infrastructure, instead of manual configuration. Computing infrastructure includes servers, storage centers, databases, networks, and web servers. IaC is an integral part of the software development life cycle. The process of provisioning infrastructure is automated, so developers do not need to set up manually for each application development and deployment stage. Benefits of Infrastructure as Code Benefits of Infrastructure as Code I...

In my first The Mechanics of Infrastructure As Code Let’s start with what I’ve termed the mechanics of infrastructure as code – how Infrastructure as Code actually works – what are the components, and how do they work together to achieve the desired outcome. In the diagram below there are two blocks in the “Infrastructure as Code” section – this is typical of any IaC implementation – code that defines variables, and a definition of the desired infrastructure state. • Variables – values that change on a per-deployment basis, like the name of a VM, or the network port to load balance on. These can be provided at execution time as inputs, environment variables, or in an answer file or API call. • Definition – this is a code description of a generic desired end state, and uses the variables provided to customize each deployment of the end state. It doesn’t typically describe how to get to the desired state, that’s determined by what I’ve termed the Fulfillment Engine. Together, the Variables and Definition describe the desired Infrastructure State in a well-defined format – whether that’s a Domain Specific Language (e.g. HCL for Terraform) or a more generic language such as JSON or YAML (e.g. AWS CloudFormation). Defining the infrastructure as code enables these definitions to be managed using techniques that traditional developers use to manage their code. They can be edited with any text editor, and managed within a Source Control system such as Git, with all of the advantag...

getty Many businesses and tech leaders are taking their first steps in implementing Infrastructure as Code. Modern companies are engaged in near-constant development, testing and deploying of software applications, which necessitates a flexible infrastructure that can respond quickly and securely to ever-changing user demands. IaC makes use of high-level code to automatically provision IT infrastructure—it’s like a tech solution for managing the resources needed to develop tech solutions. The cloud era has ushered in Infrastructure as Code, which has tremendous speed and agility benefits for deploying, changing and tearing down services for virtual infrastructure. IaC enables teams to interact with infrastructure in a programmatic way to automate lifecycle management. Some automation solutions can even ingest nonprogrammatic, command-line-interface-based devices and still apply IaC management. - 2. The Risk Management Benefits Infrastructure as Code can be incredibly beneficial to an organization. First, codifying documents and configuration specifications removes the element of human error. If you can deploy Infrastructure as Code you’ve drastically minimized both the risk of human error and security risks. - 3. Security, Reusability And Governance Establishing Infrastructure as Code is only half the solution; it must be set up correctly to really add value to an organization. Setting up an IaC pipeline needs to be done with security, reusability and governance in mind. A...

My previous article about This article is about infrastructure as code (IaC) best practices and includes a sample project automating the deployment of two virtual machines (VMs) and installing Why is IaC important? Aren't my scripts enough? No, scripts are not enough. Over time, scripts become hard to maintain and hard to keep track of. IaC can help you maintain uniformity and scalability while saving lots of time that you would waste if you did every task manually. One of the problems with the culture of managing servers manually or partially automated is the lack of consistency and control, which (more often than not) causes configuration drifts and undocumented changes to applications or servers. If a server or a virtual machine has to be replaced, it's time-consuming to manually install every piece of software and do every bit of configuration. With IaC, hundreds of servers can be provisioned, deployed, and configured, usually from a centralized location, and every configuration can be tracked in a version-control system. If a configuration file has to be modified, instead of connecting to every server, the file can be altered locally and the code pushed to the version-control system. The same is true with scaling up or replacing damaged servers. The entire infrastructure is managed centrally, all the code is kept in a version-control repository like Git, and any changes required by the servers are done using this code alone. No more unique unicorns! (Sorry, unicorns!)...

In the day of modern computing, repeatability, auditability, and simplicity are core tenets of many flourishing tech companies. Application code is stored in Git or SVN, and code reviews are performed. Deployments happen in an automated fashion, enabling developers to move software and features to 'done,' thereby delivering value to whomever the customers are. For the longest time, infrastructure was left out of this practice. We managed servers manually in our data centers until configuration management and infrastructure as code (IaC) was introduced. Today, most of the world's infrastructure is being hosted in data centers owned by cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure. As we launch new infrastructure, we're actually interacting with robust APIs behind the scenes that each platform provides. This opens the door to a totally new paradigm. Infrastructure can be deployed and configured through API calls, which provides a gap for Infrastructure as Code Providers. What is Infrastructure as Code (IaC)? Now that we understand the progression of how infrastructure is managed by businesses, let's talk about what Infrastructure as Code is, exactly. Just as we check our application code into Git repos, which serves as the source of truth for all things, we can describe the shape and characteristics of our cloud infrastructure using code. In Terraform, this means writing HCL ( When infrastructure changes are desired, one...