Elevating IaC Workflows: from fundamentals to expert strategies

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the practice of managing infrastructure using techniques learned from software development. It allows you to automate your infrastructure workflows by aligning processes around automated tools that read declarative configuration files. This makes cloud infrastructure operations easier, safer, and more reliable.

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IaC tools like Terraform and Pulumi are powerful, but they don't automatically provide everything you need to manage infrastructure at scale. For instance, DevOps teams often struggle to govern IaC access, deal with differences between clouds, and monitor what's deployed.

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In this guide, we'll explain how to solve these problems by going beyond basic IaC. We'll share seven key strategies and five best practices for elevating your IaC workflows to achieve robust cloud operations at scale.

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IaC Basics: Understanding the Fundamentals

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Infrastructure as Code extends the software development process to include infrastructure management tasks. Tools such as Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation, and Azure Resource Manager provide a framework for defining infrastructure assets within config files that you can version, collaborate on, and rollback when required. The tools take your files, compare them to what's already in your cloud accounts, and then automatically apply the necessary changes to reconcile your infrastructure's state.

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A standard Terraform implementation is based on the following workflow:

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1. Write the Terraform configs for the infrastructure resources you require.
2. Run terraform plan to detect changes in your config files, compared to your live infrastructure.
3. Run terraform apply to accept the changes and apply them to your live infrastructure. Terraform will automatically provision new resources and reconfigure existing ones as required.
4. Terraform produces updated infrastructure state files that must now be stored, ready to compare the next set of changes to.

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This basic approach to IaC already offers compelling benefits over manual infrastructure management processes: provisioning steps are automated and you can use your IaC files to reproduce your configuration in different environments. However, you still need to manually run terraform apply or implement your own CI/CD pipeline tooling. Moreover, it's tricky to enforce governance policies or scale the workflow to the needs of larger teams and infrastructure environments. Let's briefly look more closely at the problems with this implementation.

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The Problems with Basic IaC

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Several pain points commonly emerge when teams either run IaC tools manually, or use them within conventional CI/CD systems like GitHub Actions or Jenkins:

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• Complex state management: You need to maintain a separate state storage solution such as AWS S3 and DynamoDB. This requires extra configuration and is a maintenance overhead.
• Difficult to align different tools and clouds: Larger organizations with many teams may use multiple IaC tools, or require multi-cloud deployments. This is hard to coordinate using standard IaC.
• Not always accessible to developers: All-or-nothing access controls mean IaC workflows are often unavailable to developers. This can affect development velocity as devs are unable to apply minor changes or start new staging environments when they need them.
• Poor visibility into what's deployed: Plain IaC tools don't support continual monitoring of your deployed resources. It's hard to track what's running in each of your cloud accounts or identify redundant assets.
• Hard to govern and secure: It's difficult to properly govern your infrastructure workflows when teams are directly interacting with IaC tools. This can result in misconfigurations or lead to changes being applied without the correct approval.

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These factors must be addressed to achieve dependable infrastructure automation at scale. Writing Terraform or Pulumi configs is a great starting point, but it's vitally important that your IaC tools are also backed by broader systems designed for advanced cloud operations.

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How to Elevate IaC Workflows with Advanced Strategies

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Let's take a closer look at how you can solve IaC operational challenges using modern tools and processes. Implementing the following seven techniques addresses the IaC pitfalls outlined above, enabling you to operate your cloud infrastructure with improved efficiency and reliability.

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1. Automate IaC Management Using CI/CD and Orchestration

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IaC workflows must be fully automated to ensure they run consistently and reliably. Use continuous delivery pipelines to automatically apply infrastructure changes once they've been committed and approved. This removes the need for developers to manually run commands like terraform apply or pulumi apply, improving efficiency and eliminating unsafe sharing of cloud credentials.

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You can implement CI/CD for IaC using conventional solutions like GitHub Actions or Azure DevOps. These solutions are typically familiar to developers, so they can feel easy to get started with. However, they're primarily designed for app deployment tasks, so they're not well-suited to handling infrastructure workflows at scale. You need to store your state files separately and it can be challenging to correctly configure concurrency settings. This can lead to dangerous infrastructure state conflicts when multiple changes are merged at the same time.

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Replacing traditional CI/CD with a purpose-built IaC orchestration platform such as Spacelift, Env0, or Terraform Cloud is an easy way to solve these issues. These platforms are specifically designed to automate IaC deployments. They listen to events in your Git repositories, then automatically run your IaC tools as you commit and merge config changes. Your infrastructure's state is fully managed within the platform, reducing your dependency on external tools. Orchestrators also include guardrails that prevent unwanted concurrency, ensuring each change releases sequentially with minimal risk of conflicts.

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2. Standardize Tools and Processes Across all Cloud Environments

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Large-scale infrastructure architectures often distribute assets across multiple providers and environments. Multi-cloud strategies offer improved performance, resiliency, and cost efficiency, but can also be much harder to consistently monitor and maintain.

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Standardizing on IaC tools that work with all your providers and platforms is a pragmatic step towards making multi-cloud operations more manageable. This means not only checking tools like Terraform and Pulumi have provider modules available for your chosen solutions, but also ensuring that your CI/CD tools and IaC management platforms can natively integrate with them too. This makes it easier to operate and secure your environments throughout their lifecycles.

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Simple multi-cloud orchestration is another benefit of dedicated IaC management platforms like Spacelift and Env0. They directly integrate with your AWS, GCP, and Azure accounts, allowing you to align all your deployments around one system. The platforms dynamically generate short-lived cloud credentials when they're needed, removing the security risks posed by manually configuring IaC tools with static credentials. Orchestrators also track your infrastructure assets across all your cloud providers, letting you standardize on one destination to achieve key monitoring tasks.

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3. Use External Secrets Managers to Safely Share Cloud Credentials

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IaC enhances infrastructure management efficiency, but it also creates credential management issues. Your IaC tools need access to cloud credentials to provision your resources, yet providing these directly to developers or CI/CD pipelines is often an unacceptable security risk.

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One solution is to rely on the direct cloud integrations provided by IaC orchestrators, as discussed above. However, this won't be possible if you choose not to use an orchestrator, or if your IaC configs connect to other external services or require multiple sets of credentials for different tasks.

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Use an external secrets manager such as Hashicorp Vault to safely provide passwords, access tokens, and certificates to your IaC tools. This lets you store all your secrets in one centralized repository, then request temporary access to them within your IaC configs. The model prevents secrets from ever being directly exposed to developers and your other tools.

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4. Implement Policy-as-Code to Achieve Continuous Security and Compliance

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Continuous compliance is a crucial requirement for real-world IaC at scale. You need control over who can modify IaC configs, when deployments are allowed, and what changes they can include. You can achieve this by implementing Policy-as-Code tools to evaluate your IaC files against specific tests.

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Popular Policy-as-Code engines such as Open Policy Agent (OPA) allow you to express custom IaC validation policies using a declarative programming language. For example, you could reject Terraform files that specify an unauthorized EC2 instance type, or which reference a container image from an untrusted registry.

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Testing your changes against your policies before you deploy them prevents non-compliant misconfigurations from reaching your live infrastructure. Policy-as-Code also makes it easier to replicate compliance configurations across different clouds and environments, supporting the operation of large-scale infrastructure architectures.

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It's possible that your policies could themselves contain errors such as broken syntax or incorrect logic. You can address this risk by keeping your policies separate from your IaC code, then writing policy unit tests that let you verify correct results. Don't start enforcing new policies until their test suite passes.

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5. Make IaC Workflows Accessible to Developers

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IaC workflows become even more powerful when they're also accessible to developers. This lets you elevate your strategy from just handling production environments to standardizing your entire infrastructure architecture, throughout the DevOps lifecycle. Developers should be able to use available IaC tools and configs to launch realistic staging and test environments on-demand.

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Opening IaC up to developers doesn't mean handing them cloud credentials and asking them to run IaC tools locally. This is inefficient, poses a security risk, and requires developers to learn how IaC tools work. Instead, you should use the capabilities of orchestrators like Spacelift and Env0 to enable self-service access to your existing workflows.

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This model simultaneously supports the needs of developers, operators, and compliance specialists. Infrastructure teams can prepare approved IaC configs, then publish them to the platform for developers to use. When devs need to start a new environment—or investigate the state of an existing one—they can do so in a few clicks, without having to directly interact with the underlying IaC tools.

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6. Use Configuration Management Solutions to Prepare Provisioned Infrastructure for Use

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Pairing IaC and configuration management tools is the most powerful way to implement complete end-to-end infrastructure workflows. Whereas IaC focuses on provisioning infrastructure assets in your cloud accounts, configuration management and IT automation tools like Ansible enable you to prepare those assets for use.

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Ansible allows you to install packages, apply config changes, and execute commands on the systems you've provisioned. It's possible to achieve these tasks using IaC modules, but Ansible's dedicated focus makes it a more versatile choice at scale. You can easily create repeatable playbooks that run procedural sequences of actions against your hosts.

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Running Ansible after you've already used Terraform or Pulumi to provision your resources makes complex infrastructure environments easier to maintain. You get full separation of concerns between infrastructure provisioning and environment configuration tasks. Include Ansible as another job in your infrastructure CI/CD pipelines, after your IaC tool has completed its run.

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7. Enable Automated Drift Detection Scans

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Infrastructure drift occurs when the resources in your cloud accounts gradually deviate from their expected configurations. It's commonly caused by unexpected automatic updates or when developers manually apply infrastructure changes outside your IaC workflow. Uncorrected drift can lead to costly errors, compliance breaches, and security issues.

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Drift must be detected and resolved early to prevent these problems. You should implement automated drift detection scans that compare your live environments to the configs defined in your IaC repositories. Any differences signal that drift is present, so you should use your IaC tool to reapply the correct state from your repository.

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You can automate this process using IaC orchestrators. Platforms like Spacelift and Env0 include easily enabled drift detection and resolution capabilities. They can correct minor discrepancies without any manual intervention, or report the full context surrounding larger problems so you can make informed decisions about how to proceed. This makes your IaC workflows more resilient at scale and supports continuous compliance requirements. If no drift is detected, you can demonstrate to auditors that your infrastructure has remained correctly configured.

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Best Practices for Expert IaC at Scale

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The advanced strategies discussed above enable you to effectively manage your cloud operations without sacrificing visibility and governance. Here's a summary of some IaC best practices to keep in mind as you develop your DevOps automation process.

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1. Standardize All IaC Workflows to Run in CI/CD Pipelines

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Your CI/CD process should be the only way to apply IaC changes. Errors, inconsistencies, and conflicts can easily occur when developers manually modify infrastructure assets outside your established workflow. It's good for developers to run scans and tests locally, but a single automated pipeline should be the only way to deploy changes to live infrastructure.

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2. Integrate Observability Suites to Monitor Infrastructure Activity

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IaC tools let you verify that your resources have deployed successfully, but that's just a single snapshot that doesn't necessarily reflect your infrastructure's true health. With observability platforms like Prometheus, Grafana, and the ELK Stack, you can monitor live metrics to analyze performance issues and detect failures.

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3. Regularly Review Tools, IaC Configs, and Policies to Maintain Performance and Compliance

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You should regularly audit your IaC strategy to ensure it continues to meet developer needs, performance targets, and compliance requirements. Infrastructure often evolves rapidly as organizations scale, so it's crucial you maintain your processes and policies at the same pace.

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4. Combine IaC and Configuration Management Tools to Implement End-to-End Environment Provisioning

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IaC isn't the end of the infrastructure management journey. Newly provisioned resources often need more setup before they're ready to use, such as by running commands to install packages and apply config changes. Combining CI/CD, IaC, and IT automation tools like Ansible gives you a complete pipeline for transforming clean environments into functioning software deployments.

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5. Ensure IaC Workflows are Accessible to Developers

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IaC and infrastructure management is usually a task for DevOps teams, but there are advantages to making your workflows available to developers too. Beyond enabling devs to bring up new environments on-demand, it’s helpful to also grant them limited access to IaC repositories. This can tighten feedback loops by letting devs commit minor IaC changes themselves. You can then enforce policies and guardrails to ensure infrastructure operators still have a chance to review changes before they’re deployed.

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Summary

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Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a crucial DevOps automation strategy, but implementations must be carefully planned to succeed at scale. You need to fully automate your workflows, continually enforce governance policies, and achieve clear visibility into all deployed resources. This requires more effort than simply running terraform apply after each change.

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The tools and techniques we've discussed in this guide let you unlock IaC's full potential. In particular, modern managed platforms like Spacelift, Env0, and Terraform Cloud give you a scalable foundation for operating your IaC workflows. These platforms empower your DevOps teams to collaborate on infrastructure with integrated CI/CD, monitoring, and governance features. They equip you to level up IaC for larger teams and complex multi-cloud architectures.

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Ready to learn how IaC fits into your own cloud transformation? Book a consultation with us here at Semantive to explore your infrastructure automation and Spacelift integration options.