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

Ansible – best practices and troubleshooting

At this point in the chapter, you know the drill by now: we are going start by discussing best practices, but this time putting an Ansible spin on them.

Ansible – best practices

Here are some of the best practices for approaching your Ansible playbooks:

  • Organize your playbooks with roles: Use roles to group related tasks, variables, files, and templates, making your playbooks easier to understand and maintain.

For more information on this, see Chapter 6, Building upon the Foundations, where we discussed roles and Ansible Galaxy in more detail – this also leads into our next bit of advice.

  • Keep playbooks modular and reusable: Write modular playbooks and tasks that can be reused in different scenarios to minimize duplication and improve maintainability.

This is where we start to differ slightly from Terraform, as Ansible can also be used to access both Linux or Windows hosts and execute...