Infrastructure as Code(IaC) 🚀

DevOps tasks before automation 😟

In the past, when you had tasks before automation and you wrote an application and wanted to deploy it on the server, for that you had to do many things like:

Get the servers and set them up
Configure networking on those servers.
Create route tables.
Install necessary softwares.
Configure the software.
Install database etc.

All these things were manually done by system administrators and as a result, there were more human resources costs and more time and effort.

The above points were just the setup phase. After that, you had to maintain them like updating the versions, deploying new releases of an application, DB backups, and updates, recovering apps and servers after crashes, and adding the new servers also, etc.

DevOps tasks after automation ✨

After the tasks were automated using DevOps, you can now automate all the processes with infrastructure-as-code(IaC). Infrastructure as code automates all the tasks instead of doing them manually.

All the knowledge and expertise of system administrators and the operations team are packed into various programs and applications that carry out all these tasks. IaC is a concept but there are IaC tools and programs(Terraform, Ansible, Chef, etc) that carry out these tasks.

Why are there so many tools? Can't we have just one tool?

Currently, there is no tool that is doing all the tasks. Instead, different tools are doing different tasks and each of them is good in that specific area.

Main categories 🤔

There are 3 main categories of such tasks

Provisioning of infrastructure
- Spinning(Twisting) up new servers
- Doing network configuration
- Creating load balancers
- Configuring all the stuff on the infrastructure level
Configuring already provisioned infrastructure
- Installing applications on the servers
- Managing those applications
- This step is required to prepare the infrastructure or servers with all the necessary stuff to deploy your application.
Deployment of application on the configured infrastructure
- With docker, the configuration and deployment are merged together.
- You package the configured application in a container and deploy them on a server.

Infrastructure as code automates the tasks in different categories for different phases. You will use the combination of 2 or more IaC tools to automate the whole process.

Terraform is used for the provision and configuring of the infrastructure and it is made specifically for the infrastructure.

Ansible and other tools are used to install and deploy applications on the provisioned infrastructure and they are made specifically for the configuration.

Terraform 💡

Terraform is an open-source Infrastructure-as-code(IaC) tool developed by HashiCorp and it helps companies with infrastructure-as-code and automation.
It is used to define and provision the complete infrastructure using an easy-to-learn language HCL(HashiCorp Configuration Language).
You can write your infrastructure as code on any cloud platform. It means that you're not dependent on a specific cloud provider like AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. Terraform will work for all.

Installation 🙂

Visit this website and download and install terraform according to your operating system. Once the terraform is installed, check its version by typing terraform --version.

Hello World Terraform Configuration

Create a directory by the name of terraform and inside that directory, create a subdirectory by the name of hello-world.
Inside the hello-world directory, create a first.tf file by typing vi first.tf.

Write the following data inside the file.

output hello {
    value = "Hello World! Enjoy"
}

After writing and saving the data, type terraform plan and it will show the key and values that you have printed and it will show you the result.

If you want to know more about terraform and study it briefly then the Spacelift blog is one of the best resources to have.

That's it.

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Thank you!

Bilal's Blog