How to handle IaC projects

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, IaC has become a critical consideration for organizations of all sizes. With IaC, developers can create the machines or resources required to run their applications easily, saving time and effort in the process. As your organization scales, IaC can help your developers focus on solving more complex problems, rather than getting bogged down in manual resource configuration.

However, it can be challenging to ensure identical, error-free, secure, and compliant configurations across different environments. This is where IaC comes in. By defining your infrastructure as code, you can make changes or add new resources by updating a piece of code, and the IaC tool will handle the configuration for you.

By adopting IaC, organizations can improve agility, speed, and consistency in resource provisioning and configuration. This enables developers to focus on delivering high-quality applications, while operations teams can manage infrastructure at scale with greater ease and efficiency.

Let’s have a look at the challenges we can face.

IaC principles

At the heart of IaC is the concept of defining your infrastructure in code. By using a declarative syntax, you define the desired final state of your infrastructure, and the IaC tool takes care of the underlying dependency resolution and resource launching steps.

To keep track of changes made to your infrastructure, you can store this code in a VCS. This not only provides you with an audit trail of who made changes but also enables you to revert to a previous version if needed.

Automated quality, compliance, and security tests can also be run on your infrastructure, allowing you to verify its compliance without investing days or weeks of effort.

By adopting IaC, your developers can avoid the tedious and error-prone task of manually defining steps or scripts to launch and configure resources. Tools such as Terraform and CloudFormation are widely used to achieve these tasks, enabling organizations to achieve greater agility, scalability, and consistency in infrastructure management.

Version control systems for IaC

It is important to store your IaC in a VCS alongside your application code. This allows for easy collaboration among developers and a clear understanding of the entire code base.

VCSs also offer a simple way to track and audit changes made to the code base, including infrastructure changes. By using pipeline features within a VCS, such as those available in GitHub or GitLab, you can enforce policies and ensure that changes meet the necessary criteria before they are deployed to production.

Some common use cases of IaC

IaC is commonly used to launch infrastructure across various cloud providers, as well as for provisioning machines upon launch. Popular tools for provisioning with IaC include Chef, Ansible, and Puppet, while Terraform and CloudFormation are commonly used for infrastructure provisioning.

IaC can also be used to deploy applications, such as with Kubernetes, by leveraging tools such as Jenkins or Ansible. In upcoming chapters, we will delve further into using IaC with Kubernetes.

Challenges and best practices with IaC

IaC provides great benefits in terms of operability and maintainability, but it also brings challenges that need to be addressed to ensure the security and stability of your infrastructure.

Adoption within the team

Integrating IaC into your organization can present a learning curve and a change in processes. Your team may need to become familiar with the language used to write IaC code and develop pipelines to execute the code. If your team is accustomed to making changes from cloud consoles and is operation-centric, transitioning to IaC can be a significant shift for them.

You can see huge, powerful resistance to learning new technologies or practices. Be ready to fight, and always be an evangelist of infrastructure automation, security, and compliance.

Configuration drift

At the start of an IaC journey, developers may not always know what changes are required for infrastructure provisioning and may opt to make changes manually via the console. This can lead to configuration drift, where the deployed infrastructure does not match the code definition, potentially causing outages or issues with future updates. To prevent this, it is important to educate the team on the consequences of manual changes and discourage their use.

To further mitigate the risk of configuration drift, you can build automation to detect drifts and ensure that only authorized personnel have access to make changes in critical environments. This can help ensure that your infrastructure remains consistent and secure.

Security

When using open source modules in your IaC pipeline, it is important to ensure that they are secure and free of vulnerabilities. Before using any open source project, it is recommended to verify that it is safe to use.

To maintain a high level of security, it is essential to establish static code analysis pipelines and continuously scan open source modules. This way, any vulnerabilities can be detected and addressed promptly.

Human factors

To prevent misconfigurations from entering production, it is crucial to catch validation errors that may be introduced when a developer makes changes. With Terraform, you can easily implement a validation step using the Terraform plan functionality. It is essential to have a full understanding of the plan outputs before applying them to ensure that no unexpected changes are made to your infrastructure.

Side effects of automation

In IaC, a lot of code will be reused as you automate infrastructure creation. However, any small misconfiguration can propagate across a large set of resources very easily. Therefore, it’s crucial to catch these errors during the pipeline verification stage.

To prevent unexpected changes to existing resources, always use versioning when updating modules.

Keeping up to date with cloud providers

Changes to cloud providers’ APIs and policies can affect your existing infrastructure, which means that you need to update your tools and code. This can be especially difficult if you’re using open source tools, as updates may not be immediately available. If there is a delay in releasing changes, it can result in incorrect permissions or issues with provisioning access to machines if the RBAC API changes. Therefore, it’s essential to keep your tools and code up to date with the latest API changes and policies to ensure your infrastructure continues to function properly.

Maintainability and traceability

Having a well-defined procedure for promoting infrastructure changes to the production environment and assigning responsibilities is crucial to ensure that all changes are properly verified. This helps to avoid chaos and maintainability issues on the VCS side.

Furthermore, traceability is an added advantage of using VCSs as all changes are logged and can be easily tracked. For instance, Git provides the Git log command and commit history to view all changes made to the code.

RBAC

Many IaC tools, including Terraform, lack an intrinsic RBAC feature, a crucial element that governs who has permission to access, manage, and execute specific resources and operations. In the absence of native RBAC, these tools are dependent on the underlying platform or VCS where the code resides. Consequently, it’s assumed that individuals executing the code possess the requisite permissions, transferring the onus of managing and enforcing RBAC to the VCS. This can involve setting up specific access controls, permissions, and restrictions within the VCS to ensure that sensitive and critical infrastructure configurations are only accessible and executable by authorized personnel, thereby maintaining security and compliance standards.

VCS and proper approval flows

It is essential to implement version control in your IaC workflow to maintain control of your code, track changes, and facilitate auditing. It is also important to establish a process where changes cannot be merged into production without proper approval and validation. One option is to incorporate validations into the Continuous Integration (CI) process of GitHub or GitLab. By treating your IaC code like any other application code, you can ensure that your infrastructure is an integral part of your overall system.

Handling secrets properly

You need to manage two types of secrets in your IaC pipeline. The first type of secret is used to create resources in the cloud, and only the admin of the repository should have access to them. For this purpose, you can use a secret variable in GitHub or GitLab.

The second type of secret is generated when the code is executed, such as the password for an IAM user in AWS. It’s crucial to ensure that these secrets are not getting logged anywhere and are securely transmitted to users.

Immutable infrastructure

Consider applying the principle of immutable infrastructure if you need to make changes to your infrastructure. This approach involves creating a new machine with the required changes and replacing the old machine with the new one, instead of modifying the existing machine. By doing so, you can ensure that your changes are in line with the code, and there are no snowflake server states. The concept behind immutable infrastructure is to manage machines entirely through code, and no manual changes should be made.

Validations and checks

By implementing checks and validations in the CI pipeline, you can catch security issues and misconfigurations on the left side of the pipeline. This helps increase the frequency of the development cycle and maintain the security of each release.

Infrastructure as code and Kubernetes

Using the same principles as IaC, you can deploy your application on Kubernetes. Kubernetes objects are declarative files that can be defined and stored in a code repository. These files can then be applied to a Kubernetes cluster using a controller to deploy your application.

Conclusion

Despite the many advantages of IaC, there are also several challenges that must be addressed to ensure the success of the implementation. These include the need for proper validations and checks, as well as a well-established process to avoid security lapses that can lead to increased costs and compromised environments.

Fortunately, the emerging practice of GitOps combined with IaC enables faster and safer rollout of changes, resulting in quicker deployment cycles and large-scale auditing. IaC is not only the present but also the future of managing infrastructure, applications, and tooling, and its adoption is highly recommended for reducing operational costs.

By using IaC tools, organizations can achieve the same level of productivity and efficiency with fewer personnel, making it an attractive option for businesses looking to optimize their resources.