Infrastructure as Code & CloudFormation

What Is Infrastructure?

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(IT) Infrastructures are the components required to operate and manage enterprise IT environments. These components include hardward, software, networking components, an operating system(OS), and data storage, all of which are used to devlier IT services and solutions.

What Is Infrastructure As Code?

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Infrastructure as code(IaC) is the managing and provisioning of infrastrueture (e.g. networks, virtual machine, ...) through code instead of manual processes(e.g. manually create AWS Step Function, or AWS SNS). An IaC generates the same environment every time it is applied.  

With IaC, configuration files(JSON or YAML file) are created by devleopers that contain your infrastructure specifications, which makes it easier to edit and distrubute configurations. It also ensures that you provision the same environment every time.

Configuration files -> managing infrastructures with same environment

IaC Example 

Four steps of IaC example are as follows:

1. The templates developers write are Serverless YAML templates(configuration file).

2. The configuration file which describes all the resources are input into serverless. (in command line)

3. Serverless compiles those templates into JSON Cloudformation templates and deploy. (machine readable file). Cloudformation always gets called as the provider is set to 'aws'.

4. Cloudformation creates resources such as AWS SNS, Step function, or Lambda according to the template.

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What Is CloudFormation?

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ColudFormation is AWS' service for creating infrastructure as code. Developers store a configuration file describing all the resources(e.g. AWS SNS, Lanbda, etc) necessary for the application, AWS then automatically creates those resources for your applications.

Why CloudFormation?

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First of all, by having your infrastructure as code, you can enjoy all the advantages of git. All changes to the infrastructure are logged and backed up at all times. If the current infrastructure breaks, you can simply re-run the CloudFormation template. With maual setups, developers have to manually delete and re-create every infrastructure item for an application.

 

Reference

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https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/devops/deliver/what-is-infrastructure-as-code

What is Infrastructure as Code? - Azure DevOps