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Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Infrastructure as Code or IaC, builds upon the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings from cloud providers and modern datacenter automation. It is the APIs and programmatic libraries utilized within software frameworks built specifically for managing the life cycles of cloud infrastructure. It frequently encapsulates the tooling and automation used to spin up infrastructure resources for a given application.

By masking away the inconsistency of underlying cloud provider APIs, IaC offers the ability to build common patterns across a mix of heterogeneous resources. It also allows platform teams the ability to build higher order resources that meet specific business needs (beyond the low level APIs of the cloud providers). Furthermore, sane defaults and security and compliance concerns can be injected in a uniformly and made compulsory

We are seeing two categories of OSS tools in use at large: That which is occasionally reconciled like Terraform, Pulumi, CDK and continuously reconciled solutions like Crossplane or Amazon Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK).

The CNOE cohort will have to decide on the ideal IaC tool that works in tandem with the rest of delivery components, gains the overall community approval, and becomes the defacto service in use by the CNOE cohort.

  • Cohesive libraries, APIs and patterns for reconciling IaaS provider resources
  • Allows for higher order abstractions to be built
  • Can inject sane defaults and enforce security best practices
  • Can be continuously reconciled when used in conjunction with Kubernetes
  • Common implementations are
    • Terraform
    • CloudFormation
    • Pulumi
    • Crossplane