Kief Morris - Infrastructure as Code: Dynamic Systems for the Cloud Age

by Kief Morris

Copyright 2021 Kief Morris. All rights reserved.

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978-1-098-11467-1

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Ten years ago, a CIO at a global bank scoffed when I suggested they look into private cloud technologies and infrastructure automation tooling: That kind of thing might be fine for startups, but were too large and our requirements are too complex. Even a few years ago, many enterprises considered using public clouds to be out of the question.

The capabilities that these platforms offer are evolving and improving so quickly that its hard to ignore them without risking obsolescence.

Cloud and automation technologies remove barriers to making changes to production systems, and this creates new challenges. While most organizations want to speed up their pace of change, they cant afford to ignore risks and the need for governance. Traditional processes and techniques for changing infrastructure safely are not designed to cope with a rapid pace of change. These ways of working tend to throttle the benefits of modern, Cloud Age technologiesslowing work down and harming stability.

In ) to describe the different philosophies that apply to managing physical infrastructure, where mistakes are slow and costly to correct, and managing virtual infrastructure, where mistakes can be quickly detected and fixed.

Infrastructure as Code tools create the opportunity to work in ways that help you to deliver changes more frequently, quickly, and reliably, improving the overall quality of your systems. But the benefits dont come from the tools themselves. They come from how you use them. The trick is to leverage the technology to embed quality, reliability, and compliance into the process of making changes.