From Infrastructure as Code to Environment as Code

From Infrastructure as Code to Environment as Code: Challenges scaling IaC and how to resolve them

Description: Implementing and maintaining Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to automate the provisioning of Environments, becomes challenging as you scale. IaC is good at provisioning individual resources (or a few of them together) but engineering teams want an entire environment with various components like networking, platform (ec2/eks), database, s3 buckets, etc. to deploy and operate their applications.

To provision and tear down an entire environment, these teams have two options. They can either hand roll pipelines to manage individual resources and then manage complex dependencies between these resources within those pipelines or create a monolith IaC for the entire environment. These approaches are inefficient and slow down feature development and innovation. What if there were a better way?

In this presentation, we will introduce Environment as Code (abstraction over IaC) that enables teams to provision & teardown entire Environments in an efficient way and promotes best practices like loosely coupled infrastructure resources.

** Key Takeaways: **

* Challenges scaling Infrastructure as Code
* What is Environment as Code?
* How Environment as Code can help resolve those challenges?

Transcript

1. From Infrastructure as Code to Environment as Code Challenges scaling IaC and how to resolve them Adarsh Sha h Engineering Leader, Coach, Public Speake r Founder & CEO at CompuZes t @shahadarsh 
 https://compuzest.com https://bit.ly/iac-to-eac
2. https://compuzest.com @shahadarsh Infrastructure as Code Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is an approach that takes proven coding techniques used by software systems and extends it to infrastructure. It is one of the key DevOps practices that enable teams to deliver infrastructure, and thereby software running on it, rapidly and reliably, at scale.
3. https://compuzest.com @shahadarsh IaC: Principles, Patterns, and Practices • Key Principles • Idempotenc y • Immutabilit y • Patterns and Practice s • Source Contro l • Modularize and Versio n • Documentatio n • Testin g • Security and Complianc e • Automate Execution from a Shared Environmen t • IaC Pipelin e • GitOps Article/Talk: https://bit.ly/iac-to-eac
4. https://compuzest.com @shahadarsh Idempotency Idempotency means no matter how many times you run your IaC and, what your starting state is, you will end up with the same end state. This simpli fi es the provisioning of Infrastructure and reduces the chances of inconsistent results.
5. https://compuzest.com @shahadarsh Non-Idempotent Provision VM VM VM { } IaC 3 VMs End State
 Expected = 3 Actual = 6 Idempotent End State
 Expected = 3 Actual = 3 Reapply VM VM VM Provision VM VM VM Reapply No change { } IaC 3 VMs
6. https://compuzest.com @shahadarsh Immutability Immutable infrastructure means instead of changing an existing infrastructure you replace it with new. By provisioning new infrastructure every time, you are making sure it is reproducible and doesn’t allow for con fi guration drift over time.
7. https://compuzest.com @shahadarsh Provision v1 v1 v1 User Mutable Infrastructure { } IaC Apply changes v2 v2 v2 Change { } IaC v1 v1 v1 Provision User Provision v2 v2 v2 User Immutable Infrastructure { } IaC Change { } IaC Deploys v2 to same Infrastructure Provisions new Infrastructure with v2
8. https://compuzest.com @shahadarsh Automate Execution from a Shared Environment
9. https://compuzest.com @shahadarsh VM VM VM Static Analysis Unit Tests Continuous Integration Compliance Integration Tests Security VM VM VM Testing & Validation Ephemeral Environment Provision Smoke Tests Smoke Tests Note: This example is for Platform Layer but similar pipeline should be added for other layers (account, network & application) IaC Pipeline
10. https://compuzest.com @shahadarsh GitOps GitOps = IaC + (Work fl ow + Control Loop)
11. https://compuzest.com @shahadarsh Create Pull Request , Plan & Tests Terraform Apply VM VM VM Terraform Plan & Tests Approve & 
 Merge PR Control Loop Verify Desired & Actual State Sync (if different) Provision GitOps
12. https://compuzest.com @shahadarsh
13. https://compuzest.com @shahadarsh
14. https://compuzest.com @shahadarsh Challenges scaling IaC • Hand-rolling Pipelines • Teams want an Entire Environment and not just individual resources • Replicating Environments • Visualizing and Understanding Environments • Infrastructure Drift Article/Talk: https://bit.ly/iac-to-eac
15. https://compuzest.com @shahadarsh Environment as Code Environment as Code (EaC) is an abstraction over Infrastructure as Code that provides a way of de fi ning an entire Infrastructure Environment. It manages state for the environment including dependences between various resources in the Environment and supports best practices like Loose coupling, Idempotency, Immutability etc. for an Environment. It allows teams to deliver entire environments (instead of individual infrastructure resources) rapidly and reliably, at scale.
16. https://compuzest.com @shahadarsh Environment as Code Example
17. https://compuzest.com @shahadarsh EaC features • De fi ne Entire Environment • Various Infrastructure Resource s • Dependencies between resource s • Manage State for the entire Environmen t • Idempotent and Immutable for entire Environmen t • Loose Couplin g • Visualize and Understand Environment s • Infrastructure Drift
18. Adarsh Sha h Engineering Leader, Coach, Public Speake r Founder & CEO at CompuZes t @shahadarsh 
 https://compuzest.com https://bit.ly/iac-to-eac