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Available Tools​

Approach: There are various types of tools that can allow you to deploy infrastructure as code

  • Terraform
  • CloudFormation
  • Heat
  • Ansible
  • SaltStack
  • Chef
  • Puppet
  • Others

Categories of Tools​

Categories

  • Infrastructure orchestration
  • Configuration management

Infrastructure Orchestration​

Concepts

  • Focuses on creating and managing raw infrastructure components (like servers, networks, etc.)
  • Handles the provisioning of infrastructure resources according to specified requirements

Example: Create three servers with 4 GB RAM and 2 vCPUs. Each server should have a firewall rule to allow SSH connections from Office IPs

Configuration Management​

Concepts

  • Focuses on maintaining the desired state of systems and ensuring consistency across configurations
  • Used after infrastructure is provisioned to configure software, manage application settings, or install necessary software (e.g., antivirus, monitoring agents, etc.)

Example: All servers should have Antivirus version 10.0.2 installed

How Do They Work Together?​

Example

  • Step 1 (Provisioning): You use Terraform to create 10 new EC2 instances on AWS
  • Step 2 (CM): As soon as Terraform finishes creating those 10 instances (which are still empty, with only an OS), Ansible connects to them to install your database, web server (Nginx), and deploy your application code

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Note: Today, this line has become a bit blurry

  • Terraform can run provisioners (like remote-exec) to configure a server after creating it (but this is discouraged)
  • Ansible also has modules to create cloud resources (like aws_ec2)

How to Choose IAc Tool?​

Prerequisites

  • Is your infrastructure going to be vendor-specific in the longer term? (e.g., AWS)
  • Are you planning to have a multi-cloud / hybrid cloud-based infrastructure?
  • How well does it integrate with configuration management tools?
  • Price and Support

Case 1: Cloudformation

  • The organization is going to be based on AWS for the next 25 years
  • Official support is required in case the team faces any issues related to the IaC tool or the code itself
  • They want some kind of GUI interface that supports automatic code generation

Case 2: Terraform

  • The organization is based on a Hybrid Solution. They use VMware for an on-premise setup and AWS, Azure, and GCP for the Cloud
  • Official support is required in case the IaC tool has any issues
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