The Implications of Infrastructure as Code

The Implications of Infrastructure as Code

Puppet, Chef, Fabric, Capistrano, Ruby, Python, Github, EC2, Heroku – the list goes on. These are just some of the disruptive forces that have revolutionised what it means to manage systems in the twenty first century. One of the most interesting and important trends to emerge from this paradigm shift is the desire and willingness to treat Infrastructure as Code. Although not synonymous with Devops, its methods and objectives are both supportive and complementary. I think it's fair to say that if you're doing Devops today, you're probably treating your infrastructure as code.

Jesse Robins describes the goal brilliantly:

"Enable the reconstruction of the business from nothing but a source code repository, an application data backup, and bare metal resources"

In practice this means rethinking the way we design, build and manage our systems. We need to break infrastructure down into modular services, and tie them together in an automatable way. In order to do this at scale, and in a cloudy world, we've found it's necessary to move beyond shell scripts and ssh for loops. This is where tools like Puppet and Chef come in – they enable and encourage us to abstract the problem, and define it in a high level language – to write code that captures the essence what we need to achieve. Each of these services will be made up of snippets of code, with varying degrees of complexity. In a large and involved infrastructure, the size of the endeavour is not insignificant. The move to Infrastructure as Code means, quite simply, that the task of building and maintaining a modern server environment begins to look a lot like the task of managing a software project. Of course this is entirely in keeping with the Devops way – as we break down barriers between developers and sysadmins, and start collaborating and working out how to solve problems together, it seems natural that both the methods and the output start to look less like traditional operations tasks, and begin to take on some of the flavour of the programming world.

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