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 Amazon Web Services

AWS is a cloud infrastructure platform owned and operated by the e-commerce giant Amazon, which you probably already guessed, given the name.

The company began experimenting with cloud services in 2000, developing and deploying application programming interfaces (APIs) for their internal and external retail partners to consume. As more and more of the Amazon retail partners consumed more of the software services and grew at an exponential rate, they realized they would need to build a better and more standardized infrastructure platform to not only host the services they had been developing but also ensure that they could quickly scale as well.

Off the back of this requirement, Amazon engineers Chris Pinkham and Benjamin Black wrote a white paper, which Jeff Bezos personally approved in early 2004. The paper described an infrastructure platform where the compute and storage elements could all be deployed programmatically.

The first public acknowledgment...