Defining an Effective Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Strategy: Building for Scalability and Efficiency

Unleashing the power of code. A step-by-step strategy for building a scalable and efficient infrastructure with IaC.

Building a robust infrastructure is a crucial aspect of any company's success. As the business grows and evolves, the need for a scalable and resilient infrastructure that can adapt to changing requirements becomes inevitable. However, manually managing infrastructure can be time-consuming, error-prone, and inefficient. That’s where Infrastructure as Code (IaC) comes in. IaC allows you to define the infrastructure using code, making it more manageable, repeatable, and scalable.

In this article, we’ll explore how we defined an IaC strategy that enables us to build and manage infrastructure efficiently.

IaC

Infrastructure as Code is a method of defining and managing infrastructure using code. By treating infrastructure as code, IaC allows for greater efficiency, scalability, and repeatability than traditional manual infrastructure management methods. With IaC, infrastructure resources such as servers, storage, and networks are defined and deployed using code that can be versioned, tested, and automated. This approach provides several benefits, including the ability to quickly spin up and scale infrastructure resources, reduce human error, and increase the speed of infrastructure deployment. In the next section, we will explore the basics of IaC and how it can help engineers efficiently manage their infrastructure.

Choosing the Right IaC

Choosing the right IaC tool is a decision that can greatly impact the effectiveness and efficiency of your infrastructure management. Several popular IaC tools and frameworks are available, each with its strengths, capabilities, and limitations. When selecting an IaC, we consider the following factors:

1. Evaluate the tool’s capabilities and ensure it supports the infrastructure providers we use or plan to use, such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
2. Consider the learning curve associated with it. Evaluate its documentation, community support, and available learning resources such as tutorials or courses.
3. Determine if the tool allows us to customize and extend its functionality to meet your requirements. Look for features such as support for custom plugins or the ability to define your resource types.
4. Assess the size and activity level of the tool’s community. A vibrant community can provide valuable resources, plugins, and community-contributed modules, making it easier to leverage best practices and benefit from shared knowledge.
5. How the IaC tool integrates with our existing development and deployment workflows. Look for features like integration with popular CI/CD pipelines, source control systems, or infrastructure monitoring tools.
6. Evaluate the tool’s roadmap, release cycle, and vendor support. Choose a tool that is actively maintained, regularly updated, and has a solid user base to ensure ongoing support and updates.

Evaluate different IaC tools and frameworks to find the best fit for their unique requirements. Terraform, with its extensive provider ecosystem, offers a versatile and cloud-agnostic solution. Ansible, on the other hand, excels in configuration management and automation. CloudFormation provides native integration with AWS services, making it an excellent choice for organizations heavily reliant on AWS.

Embracing Terraform for Streamlined Infrastructure Management

With its extensive feature set and widespread adoption, Terraform offers different benefits that align with the needs of seeking efficient infrastructure management and that is why it was chosen by us as our IaC provider. Let’s delve into some of the advantages of choosing Terraform as your IaC tool:

• It supports multiple cloud providers, and integrates with different cloud services and platforms, allowing organizations to avoid vendor lock-in, simplify the management of complex infrastructures, and adopt a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud strategy.
• Enables defining infrastructure state declaratively, automating provisioning and management, and ensuring scalability and repeatability.
• Promotes a modular approach, creating reusable building blocks for accelerated development and consistent environments.
• A thriving community, contributed modules, best practices, and documentation make Terraform a reliable and well-supported choice for infrastructure management.

Designing Your Infrastructure as Code

Designing an effective IaC solution involves careful planning. We started by defining infrastructure components and their interdependencies — breaking down infrastructure into reusable modules fosters code reusability and maintainability. We employed best practices, such as utilizing variables for flexibility, keeping code modular, and implementing testing and validation to ensure the reliability of the infrastructure.

Here are some reusable modules that were implemented and used by all the engineering teams:

Implementing the IaC Solution

Once the design is in place, it’s time to implement the IaC solution. This involves deploying code, managing configuration, and monitoring infrastructure. Engineers can reduce manual effort, minimize human errors, and maintain consistency across environments by automating these processes. Additionally, adopting practices like change management ensures smooth updates and enhancements to the infrastructure codebase.

When developing Terraform modules, it is essential to follow best practices to ensure reusability, ease of use, and maintainability. Here are some insights that we use to implement a Terraform module that adheres to these principles:

• Start by organizing our Terraform module into a logical directory structure, making it easier to navigate and understand.
• Split the modules into smaller, reusable components to promote modularity.
• Leverage input and output variables to allow users to customize the module’s behavior.
• Provide comprehensive and clear documentation for your module explaining the module’s purpose and usage examples.
• Implement variable validation to ensure inputs conform to expected formats.
• Foster a community around your Terraform module by encouraging user feedback, contributions, and issue reporting.
• Actively address user concerns, feature requests, and bug reports to improve the module’s quality and user experience.

Managing Our IaC Infrastructure

To effectively manage infrastructure as IaC, we consolidated all Terraform projects into a mono repository. This speeds up code management, simplifies version control, promotes collaboration, and enables consistent CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions. Treating infrastructure code like a software project, the mono repository facilitates efficient tracking, branch management, and pull request handling, also boosts collaboration, automates testing and deployments, and encourages code reuse. This approach ensures stable and more reliable infrastructure management.

Let’s go a little deep to understand our pipeline workflow:

The above workflow runs using a Terraform project with files structure like:

Imagine we have the “Product Catalog” project, where we manage all the necessary cloud resources for this application. Let’s take a look at the files you’ll find in this project:

"product-catalog" (* Project main path *)
├─ "catalog-info.yaml" (* Backstage configuration file *)
├─ "ecr.tf" (* Elastic Container Register definitions *)
├─ "env"
│   ├─ "backends"
│   │   ├─ "dev.tfvars" (* Terraform backend file definitions *)
│   │   └─ "prod.tfvars" (* Terraform backend file definitions *)
│   ├─ "dev.tfvars" (* Terraform variables with values for development environment *)
│   └─ "prod.tfvars" (* Terraform variables with values for production environment *)
├─ "locals.tf" (* Terraform file to create expressions, so you can use the parameters multiple times within a module instead of repeating the expression. *)
├─ "route53.tf" (* Route53 definitions *)
├─ "secrets.tf" (* Secrets Manager definitions *)
├─ "sqs.tf" (* SQS Queue definitions *)
└─ "vars.tf" (* Terraform file to manage all variables *

The ECR, Route 53, Secrets Manager and SQS definition files are using our Terraform Modules repository as a source.

Building a solid infrastructure is vital for engineering success, and Infrastructure as Code offers a powerful solution. Organizations can establish a strong foundation by understanding the concept, selecting the right tools, designing a scalable architecture, implementing best practices, and adopting robust management strategies. Embracing Infrastructure as Code empowers to iterate quickly, scale effortlessly, and focus on what matters most: innovation and growth in an ever-evolving business landscape.

If you’re seeking a dynamic and cutting-edge environment, we have some exciting opportunities for you. At Inventa, we pride ourselves on leveraging state-of-the-art platforms and pushing the boundaries of technology development. We’re on a mission to build a remarkably reliable, highly observable, and scalable product that will make waves in the industry.

Ready to embark on a thrilling journey with me? Take the first step by applying simply click here to explore our open positions. If you have any questions or want to learn more about our team, don’t hesitate to reach out to us on LinkedIn.