Infrastructure as Code : Automating your cloud journey
Traditionally, IT infrastructure management has been a completely manual process. Infrastructure provisioning was time-consuming and costly, requiring skilled workers to manually set up servers and build and maintain operating system software, connect networks, middleware, storage, etc. However, technologies such as virtualization and cloud solved the problem of physically managing the hardware, allowing developers to provision infrastructure such as containers, virtual servers, and other services as per requirement. Hyper-scalers such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have revolutionized critical IT infrastructure management by providing valuable services to millions of their customers over one last decade.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) solves problems associated with traditional IT infrastructure configuration and management, enabling developers to quickly set up and provision a fully-documented and versioned infrastructure by simply running a script. It’s getting quite popular as IaC eliminates the need to track environmental changes and configuration inconsistency. Similarly, IaC can be used in cloud migration, which helps in reducing operational complexity regardless of the customer’s current state in the journey toward cloud. Further, IaC is ideal from a security and operations perspective for mid to large-sized organizations on their cloud journey.
Terraform: Making Infrastructure as Code adoption easy
Cloud deployment, planning, configuration, migration, and the related changes can all be done uniformly and centrally using cloud instances and services managed as code in a version-control repository like GitHub with IaC. Terraform by HashiCorp is one of the prominently used tools for cloud Infrastructure as Code. Terraform is a full-featured, cloud-skeptical, open-source tool that allows to effectively plan, design, and improve custom IaC that supports multiple public and private cloud service providers. It allows customers to easily migrate from one cloud service provider to another or from on-premises to public cloud as per their requirement. This open-source technology offers enterprises a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and a higher return on investment (ROI). Alternative IaC solutions from leading hyper-scalers, such as AWS cloud formation, Azure resource manager, and others, are also available in the market. But Terraform’s flexible abstraction of resources and providers gives it an advantage over competing solutions in a multi-cloud environment.
Businesses are looking for cost-effective and modular IaC solutions that can expedite resource deployment, provisioning, and migration from on-premises to multiple clouds as their cloud environment grows. Terraform is one of the choices that businesses should consider because it can be used to plan, execute, push and remove configuration and adjustments across all cloud platforms using its command line interface (CLI). There are other cloud-native solutions available as well. However, they have a built-in option only, making their adoption difficult within an enterprise. Terraform brings in a lot of simplicity in the ecosystem by provisioning the resources with the least manual intervention once the user defines the final state.
Without an IaC approach, cloud implementations and migrations were more complicated, non-compliant, and risky from a security standpoint. This is because deployment and migration were done manually using excel runbooks, making it a more human-centric approach and leading to the limited scale of deployment and infrastructure elasticity. Infrastructure as Code enables us to migrate to the cloud without disrupting the current IT landscape due to its automated approach.
Reasons to implement IaC now
- Enables less cloud rambling, leading to more consistency
- Assists in the compliance and proliferation of cloud infrastructure
- Makes cloud migration and app modernization simple by allowing seamless interaction of public cloud and on-premises infrastructure
- Lower management costs and better ROI on cloud expenditure
- Logging and versioning via GitHub help in tracking and managing changes in code
HCLTech DRYiCE: A perfect partner for your Infrastructure as Code adoption
Unarguably, Infrastructure as Code has become a critical component of cloud migration. It's the logical next step in cloud migration to address issues related to provisioning, management, configuration, and security compliance. Infrastructure as Code can help organizations automate infrastructure and reduce costs, manual labor, and other human error. All these benefits certainly make IaC worth consideration.
Our offerings DRYiCE SX and iAutomate can combine with Terraform to help our customers solve their operational issues. By integrating Terraform with My Cloud, HCLTech can assist enterprises in delivering cloud-based services by converting business demand into consumable services. The DRYiCE portfolio of products is backed by over 8 years of research, partnership, and IP creation. These products offer holistic benefits in cloud management, virtual assistance, workplace optimization, end-to-end automation, business process optimization, and service orchestration. They are well equipped to meet diverse business requirements as we go forward into the age of AI and automation, with enterprises increasingly adopting them as crucial business drivers for next-gen outcomes.
Learn more about HCLTech’s DRYiCE offerings here: https://www.dryice.ai/
