Infrastructure Automation
Infrastructure Automation involves using software to automate the provisioning, deployment, and management of infrastructure components.
Goal
The goal of infrastructure automation is to increase efficiency, reduce human errors, improve consistency, and enable scalability in managing infrastructure. It aims to streamline the deployment and operation of infrastructure components, allowing teams to focus on delivering value through software development rather than managing underlying systems.
Context
Code goes through multiple different environments before it reaches production. The configuration settings on the developer's machine may differ from the test environment, which may differ from the staging environment, which may differ from the production environment. A huge amount of time has been lost debugging issues that are caused by differences in configuration settings. Infrastructure automation gets rid of the "It works on my computer" problem by ensuring that the infrastructure is set up consistently across all environments.
Practices
| Automation Type | Description | Benefit |
|---|---|---|
| Cloud Infrastructure | Using cloud services to provision and manage infrastructure, such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. | There is no need to order, and wait for delivery, of physical hardware. |
| Infrastructure as Code (IaC) | Managing and provisioning infrastructure through code, using tools like Terraform, Ansible, and CloudFormation. | Enables automation, consistency, and reproducibility. |
Inputs
| Artifact | Description |
|---|---|
| System Architecture | The structure and behaviour of the software system, including its components, interactions, and dependencies. |
Outputs
| Artifact | Description | Benefits |
|---|---|---|
| Provisioned Infrastructure | Infrastructure components set up and configured automatically according to the specified requirements. |
|
Anti-patterns
- Manual Infrastructure Management: Relying on manual processes to provision and manage infrastructure, leading to inconsistencies and errors.
- Overly complex automation scripts: Overly complex automation scripts that are difficult to maintain or understand.
- Not incorporating infrastructure automation into the CI/CD pipeline: Not incorporating infrastructure automation into the CI/CD pipeline, missing opportunities for seamless deployments.