Automating Cloud Infrastructure Management for AWS Projects
Automating cloud infrastructure management can greatly reduce the amount of time and effort DevOps engineers put into configuring the infrastructure of cloud-based projects. In this post, we describe why automating infrastructure management is worth your time and money.
Why manage infrastructure as code?
The infrastructure as code (IaC) approach allows DevOps engineers to simplify and automate the creation, management, and monitoring of software infrastructure.
With IaC, DevOps engineers can describe infrastructure elements, required policies, and resources in machine-readable configuration files. These files allow engineers to streamline resource management, copy infrastructure from one project to another, and share project knowledge.
Why should you automate cloud infrastructure management?
Once an application is deployed in the cloud, DevOps engineers can start working on its infrastructure. Of course, they can do it manually, but that’s a bad development practice. Automating infrastructure management processes, on the other hand, helps you to experience the following benefits:
3 tools for managing AWS infrastructure as code
AWS Cloud Development Kit Tool Overview
AWS Cloud Development Kit, or CDK, is an open-source software development platform that allows you to specify resources for cloud applications.
Pros
- Ensures flexible management of containerized applications.
- Allows DevOps engineers to write infrastructure code in JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, C#, Java, .NET, and Go.
Cons
- Requires perfect knowledge of programming languages to be able to configure infrastructure properly. That creates an additional challenge for DevOps engineers, who usually don’t need a deep knowledge of programming languages.
AWS CloudFormation Tool Overview
AWS CloudFormation is an infrastructure as code solution that provides you with a simple way to
- Model AWS and third-party resources
- Allocate infrastructure resources within minutes
- Manage resources during the whole lifecycle
Pros
- Supports YAML configuration files, which help to easily organize infrastructure code.
Cons
- Only supports AWS cloud services and requires learning a specific syntax.
Terraform Tool Overview
Terraform is an open-source tool that allows you to define and submit cloud infrastructure using the HashiCorp configuration language or JSON. Both have convenient and easy-to-understand syntax.
The key benefit of implementing cloud automation using Terraform is support for all major cloud computing services:
AWS
Google Cloud Platform
Microsoft Azure
DigitalOcean
Terraform also supports the Kubernetes API. Plus, it has detailed documentation and many ready-to-use modules.
For a better experience, use Terraform with Terragrunt — a wrapper that provides you with additional tools to store infrastructure configurations and allows you to use modules.
With these advantages, Terraform appears to be the most convenient choice to automate the management of cloud infrastructure. This tool is more versatile than AWS CDK or AWS CloudFormation, as it allows you to work with various cloud services and use ready-made modules. That’s why in our own cloud infrastructure management activities, we mostly rely on Terraform.
Automating cloud infrastructure management can greatly reduce the amount of time and effort DevOps engineers put into configuring the infrastructure of cloud-based projects. With the right tools and approach, you can configure infrastructure once and then reuse it in other projects, making only the necessary changes.
