Cloud computing is far from being a panacea. While it allows you to set up your infrastructure quickly, it introduces new issues such as possible inconsistencies and a lack of accountability. Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) allows organizations to manage the IT infrastructure using configuration files and treat them as just any other piece of code. The advantages of IaaC templates include the near elimination of human error during the deployment process and the introduction of CI/CD pipelines.

The Konekti infrastructure-as-code (IaC) Foundations solution aims at providing the necessary starting IaC framework required to take full advantage of a new cloud-based infrastructure. It leverages tools such as Terraform and CloudFormation to create the DevOps infrastructure required to manage your cloud deployment.

How It Works:

The initial step in the automation solution is to bring your development and cloud architectures team together for a requirement gathering workshop. In this session, we’ll examine current DevOps practices and tools. Our questions during the session will help determine which IaC tools and supporting infrastructure (version control, security, CI/CI tools) are best for your organization. Once the IaC environment and workflow is agreed on, Konekti engineers will develop the IaC templates and the supporting environment, using industry best practices for security and repeatability. After the handover, Konekti engineers will work with your development team to demonstrate the initial instantiation of cloud resources and how the tool handles updates to specific resources.

What Konekti will deliver

High-level IaC WorkFlow Design

Based on requirement gathering conversations we will determine and share a high level plan for the project:

• The IaC tools to be used for the project
• The number of IaC templates to be developed and their relationship
• Services covered by the IaC solution and any caveats that customer needs to be aware of
• Version control system to be used for the IaC templates
•  CI/CI pipeline and the tools for the maintenance and testing of the IaC tools

IaC Templates

Once the customer approves the high level blueprint and the workflow of the solution, our engineers will work to deliver the actual templates. Our goal is to create the IaC templates that fit your requirements and timelines and are organized to facilitate their long term maintenance and upkeep. Our engineers will test the templates in multiple AWS regions before handing off the templates to your company for evaluation.

Version Control

Software teams may already be using Git, CVS, SVN, or another version control tool to maintain a version of application code. The same practice should be applied to your IaC codebase. If such a system does not exi we will work with your team to establish a viable version control system for the IaC templates.

IaC Security

The Konekti Iac Foundations solution enables DevOps and security teams to identify insecure configurations in Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) templates and vulnerabilities in container images so that security issues are identified before actual resources are deployed in runtime environments.

To identify potential issues we help integerate tools needed to scan content in your IaC templates such as AWS CloudFormation Templates (JSON or YAML format) and HashiCorp Terraform templates (HCL format) against a list of IaC security and compliance policies.

Testing Pipeline

Importance of continuous testing for DevOps is well understood. Same applies to any IaC template in order to avoid any post-deployment issues.  Konekti, will help with creation of the CI/CD tools required for the continuous testing of the IAC template

Handover

After the handover, Konekti consultants will work with your development team to demonstrate the initial instantiation of cloud resources and how the tool handles updates to specific resources. In addition, Konekti will facilitate a successful transition to IaC by providing a half day of training on best practices for maintenance, security and testing of the IaC templates and its CI/CD pipeline.

By employing infrastructure as code, organizations can deploy their infrastructure architectures in many stages. That makes the software development life cycle more efficient, raising the team’s productivity to new levels. Developers can use IaC to create and launch sandbox environments, allowing them to develop in isolation safely. The same would be true for QA professionals, who can have perfect copies of the production environments in which to run their tests. Finally, when it’s deployment time, you can push both infrastructure and code to production in one step.