Unlocking the Power of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) in Your Organization

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a revolutionary practice in IT management that is transforming how organizations build and manage their systems. Its implementation provides significant benefits, especially in terms of efficiency, scalability, and security. IaC allows organizations to treat their infrastructure in the same way they treat their source code. This means they can automate the creation, configuration, and management of infrastructure, making it possible to quickly configure and deploy systems at any scale with minimal manual effort.

Companies like Uber, Slack, and Twitch are some cases that have successfully implemented IaC, leveraging its benefits to achieve remarkable growth and efficiency. A well-known success story is AWS, which offers CloudFormation, a service that allows users to model and provision AWS resources using text template files. Citing information published by GitHub in the Octoverse: The state of open source and rise of AI in 2023:

– Developers are operating native cloud applications at large scale: “We are seeing an increase in declarative languages that use Git-based Infrastructure as Code (IaC) workflows, greater standardization in cloud deployments, and a sharp increase in the rate at which developers were using Dockerfiles and containers, IaC, and other native cloud technologies”. (Octoverse: The state of open source and the rise of AI in 2023)

Another of the most prominent tools in the field of IaC is Terraform, which uses its own declarative language: HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL). Now let’s go with some data cited in the same article:

“Shell and HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) re-emerged as the main languages in open source projects, indicating that operations and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) work are gaining prominence in the open source space”.

– “HCL adoption recorded a 36% year-on-year growth, showing that developers are using infrastructure for their applications”.

– “The increase in HCL suggests that developers are increasingly using declarative languages to dictate how they are leveraging cloud deployments”.

Here at Insbuilt we have worked hand in hand with clients from different industries such as automotive, BPO, finance and marketing to name a few, where we have had the opportunity to implement Infrastructure as Code – IaC, particularly in AWS, in order to automate the processes of provisioning cloud resources in a safe, consistent and traceable way.

Being AWS partners, our experience working with CloudFormation in multiple projects has demonstrated to us as a team, as well as to our clients the advantages of putting into practice Infrastructure as Code using text templates which declaratively, will serve us to deploy resources in multiple AWS accounts for different work environments in an agile and efficient way.

Identifying such benefits has allowed us to reduce complexity when managing resources distributed in different environments. This is particularly useful, especially when designing a disaster recovery plan, as in the event of losing all the infrastructure we have provisioned, it could take hours or even days to redeploy it manually, whereas with IaC, we could recreate it entirely in a matter of minutes.

In conclusion, IaC is a powerful tool that can increase the efficiency, scalability, and security of an organization’s IT operations. With the right tools, like CloudFormation and Terraform, companies can fully leverage the benefits of IaC.

If you want to learn more and how it could benefit your organization by applying best IaC practices, do not hesitate to contact us, and in this way share our experiences to implement them in your project.