If you’re like most successful businesses, you always keep your eye on the latest technology trends – especially if they can help you scale your business, make your organization more efficient or cut costs.
One of the latest developments, Infrastructure as Code, has been helping organizations that use the cloud by automating tasks that would otherwise have to be performed manually by their IT teams.
Learn how Infrastructure as Code works and how your IT team and organization as a whole can benefit from this technology?
What Is Infrastructure as Code?
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a programmable type of infrastructure used for easier monitoring, provisioning and management of the resources within cloud structures.
Depending on the tools your team uses, it can be written in two ways – as declarative and imperative.
A declarative way of writing the code for IaC includes stating your end goal (desired outcome) for a certain action you want to become automatic in the system.
Imperative code for IaC is written in a form of a more refined and elaborate script that depicts nuances of different processes within the infrastructure.
It resembles programming scripts that depict step-by-step actions that have to automatically be repeated across various servers.
As a result, you can do more than automate only a few actions. Complex and descriptive language enables you to automate entire processes within your infrastructure.
What Makes Infrastructure as Code Cost-Effective for Businesses?
Let’s take a closer look at four ways IaC saves your business money:
Enables you to get the most out of your cloud technology
IaC is the next step in cloud development because it helps companies to use the full potential of cloud computing technology.
Similar to the cloud that is gradually replacing costly and outdated server rooms with more practical virtual systems, IaC makes the cloud more convenient.
It writes the code that automatizes tasks within the cloud simultaneously in different locations and cloud structures.
Reduces the Chance of Human Errors
As technology has developed, there have been more solutions in the form of different servers, storage and hardware that made our jobs easier. The downside to such advancements has been that these processes had to be manually managed.
The same applied to the cloud.
IT teams were left with minor tasks in the data centres – such as manually filling out forms. After hours of doing such laborious tasks, errors would occur once they got to the more important tasks within their job description.
IaC is designed to automate these tasks consistently, without risking human error in the process.
Shortens Disaster Recovery Time
In case something goes wrong within the infrastructure, every second counts. For example, the cloud could suffer a cyber-attack or your employees may not be able to sign in to the system.
Any setback is damaging for your company.
Cyberattacks cost companies more and more with every minute they aren’t mitigated and employees might lose hours of work if they can’t get into the systems when working from home.
With IaC, everything is written in the script – including the desired outcomes of actions that are automated.
This means that you have an entire history of your infrastructure written in the form of text that is ready to be compared with its previous versions and analysed.
Examining detailed scripts can help the IT team spot any issues and start the appropriate protocols to respond to a threat and find the right solutions in time.
What’s more, Infrastructure as Code is also a backup. You can use IaC scripts to go back a couple of steps before the issue occurred and recreate the same environment.
- Manual Work is Replaced with Automation
Codifying the infrastructure allows IT teams to automatically manage the system instead of having to manually configure OS and different hardware devices.
Automation delegates a workload that can be automated and enables your DevOp team to focus on more important tasks.
Pre-written codes can even be safely used by junior DevOps that have lower levels or access within the system.
Some things that can get automated include databases, user account management, account configuration and provisioning of resources.
What you automate will depend on your systems and organization, but it saves you money because you’ll avoid spending on manual processes that are not either cost-effective or time effective.
Should You Integrate IaC into Your Business?
Yes. Besides being a great way of managing your cloud resources more effectively, Infrastructure as code is all about saving money by working smarter instead of harder.
What makes IaC economical is that it:
- automatises workloads that would have to otherwise be completed manually
- cuts back on recovery time in case of issues
- reduces the chance of costly human errors
