Managing IT Infrastructure comprises of different services/operations like Server Operations (Provisioning, Access Management, Storage Cleanup, Patch Management & so on); Network Operations (Security, Traffic Monitoring) and many more. Historically, automation eased the Daily Operations/Housekeeping at each tower, but more of in silos.

In Past, setting up the Infrastructure was Manual, Semiautomated or automated for meeting specific tasks (Task Automation). Most of the time such automation used for handling specific tasks or daily operations only. Such development lacks standards and frameworks. And can be hard to measure the effectiveness.

Today Industry looking for a solution to break the silos and knit up varied IT Services and frame them as a single solution, and beneficiaries has benefits like:

  • Adaptive Automation for Consumers
  • Focus more on Workflow Automation than Task Automation
  • Pre-defined Measurements for measuring Automation wrt business effectiveness

Infrastructure as Code (IaC), can be one of the solutions. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a method to provision and manage IT infrastructure through the use of source code, rather than through standard operating procedures and manual processes.

There are different tools available for IaC

ANSIBLE: Ansible (created by Red Hat) is simple and powerful, allowing users to easily manage infrastructure. An agentless solution, via YAML configuration playbooks, end-user can manage & deploy infrastructure.

TERRAFORM: Terraform developed by Hashicorp, uses its own domain-specific language (DSL) called Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL). HCL is JSON-compatible and is used to create these configuration files that describe the infrastructure resources to be deployed. Terraform is cloud-agnostic and allows you to automate infrastructure stacks from multiple cloud service providers simultaneously and integrate other third-party services.

VAGRANT: Vagrant focuses on quick and easy development environments provision or small applications, that use a small number of virtual machines, instead of large cloud infrastructure environments that can span hundreds of servers across multiple cloud providers. Vagrant runs on top of virtual machine solutions from VirtualBox, VMware, AWS, and any other cloud provider, and also works well with tools like Chef and Puppet.

Author: Anuj Garg DevOps

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