At Woven, we take our website Development Operations (DevOps) very seriously and aim to ensure our operations are efficient, robust and reliable. Our team works very hard to ensure our infrastructure is cutting-edge and we have been focusing on streamlining our operations. We’re currently experimenting with bringing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) into our standard processes. Here is a summary of what our DevOps has found with the research completed to date.

What is IaC and what benefits are on offer?

As defined by Visual Studio, IaC is: “… the management of infrastructure (networks, virtual machines, load balancers, and connection topology) in a descriptive model, using the same versioning as DevOps team uses for source code. Like the principle that the same source code generates the same binary, an IaC model generates the same environment every time it is applied. IaC is a key DevOps practice and is used in conjunction with continuous delivery.”

This process sees infrastructure being transformed into plain machine readable code, which allows the whole infrastructure to be created and re-created with ease.

Why is this important?

Put simply, this means the infrastructure is locked in and can’t be changed. In the rare event that a disaster should impact our data centre, we would be able to recreate all of the running instances within minutes. We’re armed with the history of the infrastructure which gives us a better understanding as to the changes made over time. This allows us to preview changes before applying them, leading to better risk control. It also reduces cost and execution time, while allowing us to deliver a better response time for our customer’s request. In turn, this all results in us delivering increased customer satisfaction levels.

Before we can even talk about IaC, several key features must be provided by the service provider including:

• Resource provisioning by API call
• Software defined networking

Other notable IaC tools are:

Terraform: a widely used tool to write unified resource definitions produced by multiple providers, including support for all of the big players in cloud computing.

CloudFormation: a feature provided by Amazon Web Services (AWD) - we could define AWS resources using this tool.

If we did not take this approach when working with infrastructures, it would be slower to build infrastructure out of code. Of course, for an experienced pair of hands, the process is likely to be faster. Ultimately, IaC is the preferred method as all steps are reproducible - we can do something once and then re-use the code many times over. Another advantage of working this way is that less human error in setting up the running environment for applications is likely.

If you’d like to learn more about IaC or have any other queries related to web development and the digital space, contact Woven today. We service clients locally based in Victoria and Australia-wide.