Book Image

Infrastructure as Code for Beginners

By : Russ McKendrick
4 (1)
Book Image

Infrastructure as Code for Beginners

4 (1)
By: Russ McKendrick

Overview of this book

The Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach ensures consistent and repeatable deployment of cloud-based IaaS/PaaS services, saving you time while delivering impeccable results. Infrastructure as Code for Beginners is a practical implementation guide that helps you gain a clear understanding of the foundations of Infrastructure as Code and make informed decisions when implementing it. With this book, you’ll uncover essential IaC concepts, including planning, selecting, and implementing the right tools for your project. With step-by-step explanations and real-world examples, you'll gain a solid understanding of the benefits of IaC and the scope of application in your projects. You'll learn about the pros, cons, and best practices of different IaC tools such as Terraform and Ansible, and their use at different stages of the deployment process along with GitHub Actions. Using these tools, you'll be able to design, deploy, and secure your infrastructure on two major cloud platforms, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. In addition, you'll explore other IaC tools such as Pulumi, AWS CloudFormation, and Azure Bicep. By the end of this book, you’ll be well equipped to approach your IaC projects confidently.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Part 1: The Foundations – An Introduction to Infrastructure as Code
5
Part 2: Getting Hands-On with the Deployment
9
Part 3: CI/CD and Best Practices

Infrastructure as Code – best practices and troubleshooting

Let us start by discussing some general IaC best practices that can apply to various tools and platforms.

General IaC best practices

There are some common threads that we have already touched upon here, but it is essential to bring them up again as they are important:

  • Version control: Make sure you use a version control system such as Git or one of the other available systems such as Mercurial, Subversion, or Azure DevOps Server, which was previously known as Team Foundation Server (TFS), to name a few of the more common ones, to store and manage your infrastructure code.

The odds of you, either personally or within the business, already using version control for your other projects is extremely high if you are taking steps to both define and deploy your infrastructure in and as code. This means that you have experience with version control and access to the tools, processes, and procedures to maintain...