Infrastructure as Code is not trivial in nature and most of the times takes more effort than traditional infrastructure processes in terms of efficiency, maintainability, and security. Some of the strategies that I find to be most effective come with examples using Terraform and AWS CloudFormation:
- Modularize your code: IaC can be divided into reusable modules, which ensures easier maintenance and potential changes over many environments. In Terraform, I write modules for things like networking or databases that can be called within environments. This is a simple example of a VPC module in Terraform:
- Use Version Control: If I were putting IaC scripts into a Git repository, I would be versioning those, and I could use all of the different versions across branches. This is always a plus for developers working in teams, providing them with collaboration and benefits through versioning.
- Parameterisation for Flexibility: The parameterisation of configurations makes it easy to customize without having to modify core code. For example, in AWS CloudFormation, I use parameters to specify dynamic instance types or regions like so:
- Automated testing and validation: This can be executed through terraform validate, terraform plan, or AWS Cloud Formation Change Sets. Using such tools, one can test or validate infrastructure configurations before you proceed with any changes. Through previewing, they show minor defects during early phases and reduce error rates while improving deployment reliability.
- Use State Management and Remote Backends: I use remote backends, such as DynamoDB with AWS S3, for state locking in Terraform in order to ensure state files are managed securely and collaboratively.
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Then, along with these strategies, IaC is more maintainable, scalable, and adaptable to infrastructure lifecycle management with much better effects.
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