Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Automation

Sheetal Raina – Cloud Center of Excellence

Traditionally, it has been a nightmare for administrators to manage data centers and physical infrastructures. That problem has been resolved to an extent by virtualizing the servers, networks, and appliances. It eased hardware provisioning but configuration was still done the traditional way. So, problems associated with change management, rollbacks, replicating setup for dev/QA/troubleshooting remained same.

Infrastructure as code (IaC) has changed the way infrastructure is managed by converting any workload on the cloud into configuration files. These configuration files can be managed like a software code is managed, resulting in benefits.

 IaC direct impacts:

• Consistency – Removes inconsistency in environments. The same piece of configuration will produce the same result every time. It is called idempotencein the cloud world, which is the guiding principle of IaC.
• Cost – Helps with provisioning the right hardware size, eliminating the people provisioning cost, as well as with configuring and managing the hardware.
• Speed – Enhances the speed of provisioning and configuration many folds.
• Scaling – Administrator can simply change the compute configurations on the manifestation file and deploy it to any cloud service in a matter of minutes.
• Rollbacks – Changes not going as expected in a common scenario for release management. Reverting to previous version of configuration file make roll backs smoother than ever before.

In this era of cloud transformation, TP has taken a step to reduce the provisioning time and eliminate the complexity of manual processes through IaC automation. It is a GUI tool powered by Terraform to execute a no-code deployment of cloud infrastructure to perfection, keeping compliance and predefined security standards intact, while elevating and promoting rapid deployment of cloud projects, as it doesn’t require technical experience.

IaC automation enabled TP to automate infrastructure to control costs, reduce risks, and respond with speed to new business opportunities and competitive threats. It is truly the future of automated cloud infrastructure deployment.