Infrastructure as Code

A Simple Virtual Private Cloud deployed via a Fugue Composition

In part one of this series, I talked about the differences between [Infrastructure as Config, and Infrastructure as Code.] (/blog/code-vs-config/) In this article, we’ll dive into the creation of a simple Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) on AWS using a Fugue composition.

Here’s what we’re going to create. It’s a basic example of a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) which spans two availability zones (AZ) in a single region. We’re going to create four subnets (two in each AZ, and deploy a NAT Gateway in each AZ for redundancy.

Infrastructure as Code vs Infrastructure as Config

This article is part one of a multipart series exploring the idea of building a true Infrastructure as Code solution on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform.

What is Infrastructure as Code?

I’ve talked about this subject a few times and mentioned how important (and popular) the topic was at the various AWS boot camps I’ve had the pleasure of leading. I describe Infrastructure as Code as the process of decomposing the components of your solution into individual pieces, storing these pieces in a centralized code repository and managing them like we would manage our application code. When we need to build a solution, we can take these individual pieces and assemble them to create a complete solution on the AWS platform.

The Future of IaaS

I had numerous conversations this past week about the future of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and how it is increasingly becoming the third option when building solutions on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Granted, IaaS isn’t going anywhere soon, but based on the conversations I have been having recently, both Serverless and Managed Services seem to be gaining traction when you are building something new and not shifting existing technology to AWS.

Why would I choose Serverless over IaaS?

The biggest benefit I see with building Serverless solutions is that you don’t have any OS’ to manage. I wrote about turning off as many OS’ as possible earlier this year, and I still believe the value of OS’ is diminishing - quickly.

Salt Server via CloudFormation

Recently, I’ve been preparing for the AWS Developer Professional Certification. During my prep work, I’ve been reading quite a bit about “Infrastructure as Code.” via CloudFormation and wanted to implement some of the concepts that I had been reading about by working them into a project.

I decided that the project would be to stand up a SaltStack Master server in a VPC by using CloudFormation. Relatively speaking it was quite easy. The most difficult part was figuring out the cfn-init section of the templates responsible for installing the Salt server.

What is 'Infrastructure as Code'

So, you were sitting in a meeting last week, and one of your teammates happened to mention that they have made several ‘commits’ this week to the ‘infrastructure as code’ base. Everyone else seems to know what the heck that means, so you keep quiet and decide to ‘Google’ it later.

It’s simple really, let me explain.

When someone mentions ‘infrastructure as code’ what they are saying is that they have turned the infrastructure and possibly the application components into one or more snippets of code that can be used to quickly deploy new testing and development environments; or to rebuild infrastructure after an outage.