Monday, July 13, 2015

Whitepaper - Infrastructure as code

With the constantly evolving and changing market, business agility is one of the qualities to be adopted by firms to respond rapidly to the changes in internal and external environment without losing the momentum or vision. But it’s not just the business that has to be flexible and responsive, but IT also has to change to support the development process in the organization. To support this evolving business model, IT has to be ready to support this model by able to deploy applications in a reliable, consistent and repeatable manner. This can only be done via Infrastructure automation.

Infrastructure automation and practices like Infrastructure as code is one of the most important practices followed by successful DevOps teams where operations are involved much earlier in the software development process, with developers providing feedback about the configurations that needs to be supported by the infrastructure the applications are targeted to run against. Operations together with developers are involved in this earlier phase of development to get ready with the infrastructure they want by defining these configurations as code that can be executed against an infrastructure whenever needed to achieve a desired state.

Unlike the days where IT infrastructure as limited to physical hardware systems on premise, virtualization and cloud (Infrastructure as a Service) providers have made it easy for IT to rapidly change the infrastructure to the demands of the business. This new paradigm has also forced IT to adopt automation as part of the portfolio. With adopting practices from Infrastructure automation, operations could now carry out the actions otherwise performed manually in a repeatable manner across a large number of nodes.


With more and more people moving towards infrastructure automation and virtualization, this resulted in the evolution of configuration management tools like DSC, Chef, Ansible etc. it’s now easy to integrate the practices and capabilities from the software development process to build, maintain and test these actions in a manageable way. This opens the door to a new way of infrastructure automation called Infrastructure as code. With Infrastructure the practices into Infrastructure like version controlling, TDD, continuous integration, refactoring, design etc.

You can download the complete paper for free from my one drive

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