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

Choosing the Right Approach – Declarative or Imperative

Welcome to the first chapter of Infrastructure as Code for Beginners. In this book, we will be going on a journey that will take you through your first Infrastructure-as-Code deployment, and it is an honor to be accompanying you.

Before we dive into the tools we will be using throughout the book, we are first going to discuss some of the key concepts to try and get an understanding of the problems that you could try to solve by introducing Infrastructure as Code into your deployments.

We will be covering the following topics:

  • The challenges of managing infrastructure manually
  • What is meant by declarative and imperative?
  • Pets versus cattle
  • What does all this mean for our Infrastructure-as-Code deployments?