5 Best Practices for Infrastructure As Code
#3 — Ensure modularity in IaC
The core of all cloud enablement — Infrastructure as Code. It’s a term that many developers, system administrators, and businesses are familiar with, yet there is a large number of them that are still scared of moving onto a cloud-based infrastructure.
In today’s world of fast-paced development, we need tools that allow us to have more transparent ways of managing our cloud infrastructure. IaC allows infrastructure resources and configuration parameters to be treated as programmable objects and to be able to control them via code. Yet, it’s not something that should be approached lightly, with insufficient resources, or the lack of guidance.
By implementing the right practices, IaC can boost productivity through automation. This can bring significant financial savings for your business, by needing less manual work and boosting up efficiency. Organizations that don’t employ IaC as a concept are missing the opportunity of greater deliveries of stable environments and additional security benefits. The IaC market is constantly evolving, providing new solutions to business challenges, so keeping up with the trends in this field is crucial.
If you want to gain a better understanding of this highly powerful concept, keep on reading — this article will go deeper into some of the best practices of Infrastructure as Code.
What is Infrastructure as Code?
IaC can be defined as the process of replacing manual effort required for IT resource management and provisioning with simple lines of code. Historically, infrastructure was mostly a manual process — you manually created VMs, updated their software, and configured your settings and files, which was an expensive and slow process.
IaC allows you to create a file that describes what you need and let the IaC tools do the work for you. Every IaC tool uses a different format, some relying on a domain-specific language (DSL), while others use a standard template format, such as YAML and JSON.
IaC has numerous benefits — it can boost the speed, efficiency, consistency, and security of IT operations, all while minimizing the risk of human error. This approach reduces all the time-consuming tasks to minutes through automation. IaC can be implemented across various environments — from multi-cloud and hybrid cloud deployments to DevOps pipelines.
With IaC, systems can be easily reproduced, are disposable, consistent, and the processes are repeatable while the design is always changing. Those are the core principles of this approach — which are a direct result of the need to overcome the challenges in this field. If not established properly, IaC can lead to some problems like server sprawl, configuration drift, snowflake servers, and fragile infrastructure. That’s why we need to implement some best practices when it comes to Infrastructure as a Code.
Infrastructure as Code Best Practices
To maximize the benefits of IaC in your organization, it’s useful to learn more and implement some proven practices. This section describes some of the general practices of infrastructure as code.
#1 — Immutability is key
Immutable IaC states that each component is built according to exact specifications, and there’s no room for individual deviations or fixes. The servers or virtual machines are never modified and updated after deployment — which can lower failures, improve security, and make it easier to track and record changes.
The main reason for immutability in IaC is avoiding configuration drift — inconsistencies across configuration items and environments that might bring unpleasant results to your business. Once a change is required, you should avoid local snowflake reconfiguration and tweaking a running system, as much as it’s tempting.
This practice allows consistency and a higher level of support while eliminating server patching and other related issues. All changes should be made through the configuration file, and then redeploy when there is a need for an update.
#2 — Provide version control for IaC
Version control in IaC is especially important when it comes to configuration files. If you would version control any other code, why shouldn’t you do the same for them as well? IaC files need to be updated along with the IT environment they help manage. With this practice, you can easily track, manage, and restore any potential changes to your systems, with enhanced traceability and visibility.
Providing version control for IaC is especially helpful in cases where you need to debug and diagnose the issues, or possibly revert to a previous version. This practice also allows the version control system to automatically trigger actions when a change is committed, which is a key to enabling continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines.
There are numerous version control, change tracking, and source code management tools available on the market that might be suitable for your needs. Some include GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, Azure DevOps Server, etc, which can be connected to your IaC tool of choice.
#3 — Ensure modularity in IaC
Small changes and microservices are always easier to manage than a big batch of work and bulky monolithic code. It’s always convenient to find incremental changes in modules that can be made, tested, and pushed into use, one by one. This goes hand-in-hand with the microservice architecture — which allows developing, managing, and maintaining applications in the form of numerous deployable units.
It’s easier (and less work) to test a small change and make sure it’s solid, and it’s faster to fix or reverse a small change. Attempting to define everything in a single file is not as efficient as breaking each aspect of the configuration into different files, which allows easier updates of one part of a configuration without touching others.
Some of the advantages of modularity include restriction in the number of configuration changes, more accessibility control, and highly efficient dependency management. As with many good practices, you just need to get into the habit of doing the right thing.
#4 — Use continuous testing, integration, and deployment to your advantage
One of the most important IaC best practices that infrastructure teams can borrow from software development is effective testing. Running tests along with code dozens of times a day while making incremental changes is key to a quality workflow. Testing should be applied to infrastructure configurations to minimize the risks of issues further down the line of deployment.
There are many test types that can be run each time a change is made to the configuration code, e.g. unit, integration, regression tests, and many more. By implementing a solid continuous integration process, you are able to provision the configuration templates multiple times in different environments such as Dev, Test, and QA. This increases collaboration within testing, security, and development so that potential errors can be identified earlier in the development life cycle.
#5 — Be cautious of hard-coded secrets in IaC
Having exposed credentials spread through your IaC code can be of great risk for your organization. Having hard-coded secrets means potentially giving passwords to attackers and failure of authentication measures. A good practice is to avoid keeping those secrets in files pushed to a web-based service, such as version control systems, without using a secure secrets store.
Ideally, it’s always best to prevent the hard-coded secrets from making it into the main branch in the first place. But, if that is left unnoticed, scanning for exposed credentials in IaC is crucial. There are multiple techniques that can be used to identify secrets in code, such as scanning for regular expressions (patterns of other secrets), keywords (words associated with secrets such as “password”), and entropy-based scanning (words differentiating from a real language). Don’t overlook the importance of scanning for hard-coded secrets in the main branch and version history — it is just as important as scanning for IaC security misconfigurations in an initial assessment.
Final words
We hope you learned more about the best proven IaC practices. Infrastructure as Code is slowly but surely becoming the norm for organizations for automation and improved quality of deliveries. Once you’ve set up your IaC environment the right way, you will start seeing the results of a better development process.
