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

Making the code more reusable

As well as using variables, we are also able to reuse chunks of code – when we discussed Ansible in Chapter 5, Deploying to Amazon Web Services, we discussed roles. In Ansible, roles are designed to be called repeatedly, so while we used them to logically split our project into more manageable sections, we can go one step further and have them only perform a single function.

We can also do the same thing in Terraform. For most of our Azure deployments so far, we have been using a module downloaded from the Terraform registry to manage the region settings.

Claranet, the publisher of that module, also has others – let us look at how we can create a virtual network in Azure using only modules (the complete executable code can be found in this book’s GitHub repository):

  1. To start, we need to initialize the region module as we have been doing in our other Terraform code:
    module "azure_region" {
      source&...