Every organization has the desire to automate software delivery processes in order to achieve greater consistency, speed of deployment, and simplicity. However, most find it difficult to achieve a unified approach across the organization, while meeting the ongoing needs of the business. Konekti believes no cloud transformation initiative is complete without a comprehensive automation strategy. Infrastructure as a Code (IaC) allows a blueprint of your public cloud deployment to be versioned and treated like any other code, allowing infrastructure to be shared and re-used.

Through our IaC consulting services, Konekti enables businesses to manage IT infrastructure efficiently in a DevOps environment that relies on continuous delivery.

Design

Microservices architecture, where software is built in smaller modular units of code, is a popular trend. Our goal is to apply the same concept to IaC template development practices. Konekti’s IaC solutions will break down your infrastructure into separate modules or stacks then combine them in an automated fashion.

This method allows admins to have greater control over who has access to which parts of the infrastructure code. Also, modular infrastructure naturally limits the extend of changes that can be made to the configuration. Smaller changes make bugs easier to detect and limit the “blast radius” of a catastrophic mistake.

Implementation

We have found that HashiCorp’s Terraform is the simplest, best documented, and most widely supported IaC tool. In addition to Terraform, Konekti also has extensive experience in developing CloudFormation templates for AWS deployments. Terraform or CloudFormation templates are created just like code and stored in a version-controlled repository. Konekti will help your organization streamline cloud deployment and operations through our expertise in the following areas:

• Creation of modular IaC templates based on your organization’s needs
• Implementation of a version control system
• Integration of security practices into IaC delivery pipeline
• Education of staff in utilizing templates in a sandbox environment

Continuous Testing and Delivery

Konekti will work with your team to eliminate the barrier between traditional NetOps practices and DevOps. Our team can lead the way toward a successful IaC strategy with the goal of continuous testing, integration, and deployment of the IaC templates.

Our goal is to leave you with processes for rigorous testing of IaC configurations. Automated tests should be set up to run each time a change is made to configuration code. With a sound continuous integration process, IaC templates can be provisioned multiple times in different environments such as Dev, Test, and QA. Developers can then work within each of these environments with consistent infrastructure configurations. This continuous integration will mitigate the risk of errors being present that may be detrimental to your application when the infrastructure is deployed to production.

Infrastructure as code can provide many benefits such as consistency, speed of deployment, simplicity, and more. Contact Konekti if you are interested in learning more about how you can evangelize and encourage your teams to adopt the processes and tools that deliver Infrastructure-as-code, and to set up Agile and DevOps methodologies with your organization.

Operations

• Adjust security operations, incident response and forensics based on experience gained from the security and posture management tools
• Establish configuration management using revision control and automation Define and monitor cost management strategy, perform ongoing optimization