Infrastructure as Code

Infrastructure automation becomes literally an enabler of DevOps methodology. It helps companies in so many aspects like:

• eliminate the human-caused errors
• decrease the number of repeatable manual tasks
• create a detailed documentation with description of the desired state of the infrastructure
• track changes made in the infrastructure and rollback with one click, if the action was undesired
• and the last but not the least, IaC directly influence the time-to-market delivery. Since the IT staff is focused on product improvement rather than on its maintenance and fix of bugs caused by human intervention, the deployment frequency goes through the roof.

Startups depend on the deployment speed like none other. That's why infrastructure automation results in full concentration on the application optimization and new features release.
Nota bene:
Despite the evident benefits of the IaC approach, don't rush to automate everything from the early beginning if you haven't done it from scratch. Infrastructure as code implementation requires much time and efforts, especially if the current infrastructure would need refactoring before. Once your application / platform will be stable, give or take, you will be able to define what requires immediate automation and what can wait a little bit.

Our DevOps engineers have a wealth of experience in infrastructure automation. Since 2017, Alpacked helped numerous of organizations to implement automation and rebuild the infrastructure in a modern manner. We provide a comprehensive infrastructure design & support services across cloud environments (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, DigitalOcean), VMs, and on-prem. Using the best DevOps practices, we help you transform the IT capabilities faster and more efficient.

Moreover, our engineers are officially certified in Ansible and Terraform, so they have a deep expertise in working with these two most popular technologies for infrastructure as code implementation.

There are plenty IaC tools on your choice but we distinguish our TOP tools we advise to use:

• Ansible
• Terraform
• Pulumi
• AWS CDK
• CloudFormation
• SaltStack

These instruments are different. In simple words Terraform is responsible for creating the infrastructure itself , and Ansible is responsible for provisioning everything inside the infrastructure. So if you want to create for example infrastructure for simple application with backend, frontend and data layer - ideally you would use terraform to create the instances/virtual machines frontend and backend, spin up some database inside cloud, and then you use Ansible to place your code into the proper instances and configure it correctly. For sure real-world cases are more complex, but it's easy to understand the main difference. And yes, you can use Ansible to provision infrastructure on AWS, but we suggest you not to do so, we tried this and it gives lots of unneeded overhead.

This is very promising instrument and here is why - it allows you to write the actual CODE, not the YAML/JSON manifests, which gives you many capabilities of the programming languages like if/else conditions, loops and so on. In addition to this - in most of the cases Pulumi relies on terraform libraries when working with cloud providers, which gives you the ability to use everything you like in terraform, and fix with the programming language everything you don't like in terraform