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

Introducing Visual Studio Code

The final tool I am going to introduce isn’t an IaC tool but an IDE, which is used to write the code itself.

Visual Studio Code is a powerful code editor perfect for most development languages, including your IaC projects. It is feature-rich, fast, and highly customizable, making it the ideal choice no matter which of the tools you decide to go with.

The best part is that Visual Studio Code is completely free and open source. Whether you’re a professional web developer, system administrator, or DevOps practitioner, Visual Studio Code has everything you need to create well-structured code.

Is it something I use on a daily basis – as you can see from the following screenshot, via the use of extensions, you get features such as syntax highlighting:

Figure 2.2 – Our Terraform example opened in Visual Studio Code

Figure 2.2 – Our Terraform example opened in Visual Studio Code

But beyond syntax highlighting, with extensions you can also get powerful features...