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

Preparing our cloud environment for deployment

As we discussed in Chapter 4, Deploying to Microsoft Azure, we will be running Ansible and Terraform on our local machine, which means we can install and configure the AWS command-line interface (CLI).

Ansible and Terraform will use the credentials configured in the AWS CLI to authenticate against the AWS APIs. For details on how to install the AWS CLI, see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/getting-started-install.html.

Once installed, you need to generate and enter your credentials. This process is documented at https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/cli-configure-quickstart.html.

Once configured, you should be able to run the following commands:

$ aws --version
$ aws ec2 describe-regions

When I run them on my own machine, I get the following output:

Figure 5.1 – The output of running the AWS version command to check the version

Figure 5.1 – The output of running the AWS version command to check the version

For the second command, there...