Infraestructura como código

Aunque la infraestructura como código es una técnica relativamente antigua (la expusimos en el Radar en el 2011) se ha vuelto vitalmente importante en la era moderna de la nube, donde el acto de configurar la infraestructura se ha convertido en el paso de instrucciones de configuración a una plataforma en la nube. Cuando decimos “como código”, significa que todas las buenas prácticas que hemos aprendido en el mundo del software deberían ser aplicadas a la infraestructura. El uso del control de versiones, adherirnos al principio DRY, modularización, mantenibilidad, y el uso de pruebas y despliegues automatizados son todas prácticas críticas. Aquellos de nosotros con fuerte trasfondo de software e infraestructura necesitamos empatizar y ayudar a los colegas que no lo tengan. Decir “tratemos la infraestructura como código” no es suficiente, necesitamos asegurarnos de que los aprendizajes que nos costaron tanto obtener del mundo del software sean también aplicados consistentemente a lo largo del dominio de la infraestructura.

We continue to highlight infrastructure as code. This technique treats infrastructure configuration in the same way as code; checking configuration into source control, then carefully pushing changes out to the data center.

The DevOps movement continues to grow, with developers and operations staff working closely together to solve the “software last mile” problem. Infrastructure as code is a technique for treating infrastructure configuration in the same way as code; checking it into source control, then using it to push changes out to the data center. In addition to web server, application server and application configuration, we are seeing network configuration treated in the same way. Network switch, firewall and load balancer configuration can be infrastructure as code, and even changed at runtime.

The large number of hosts and devices in a modern datacenter or cloud deployment have made manually installing and configuring infrastructure unwise. Infrastructure as code is an approach whereby infrastructure configuration is scripted or described by files that are stored in version control, and changes are pushed out to the datacenter in a controlled manner. This parallels the discipline of source control and build promotion used in software development, hence ‘as code’. The two front-running open source tools for infrastructure automation are Chef and Puppet. They both use a textual DSL to script automation. Using this approach provides consistent and repeatable environment changes, reducing the manual effort involved, especially in troubleshooting environmental differences.