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 and Terraform beyond the Documentation

The next phase in our journey to Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is to take a look at Terraform, an IaC tool from HashiCorp, and Ansible, an IaC and configuration management tool from Red Hat.

We will also compare the advantages and disadvantages of using them, set them up on macOS, Windows 11, and Ubuntu Linux, and look at using Visual Studio Code as an integrated development environment (IDE) to write our code, plus look at which recommended extensions to install.

In this chapter, we are going to take a look at the following topics:

  • What is important when choosing a tool?
  • Introducing Terraform
  • Introducing Ansible
  • Introducing Visual Studio Code, the open source IDE from Microsoft

Before we start looking at the tools we will be using throughout this title, let’s quickly discuss a checklist I use to choose which tools to use in a project.