AgileOps (or Agile Operations) is the operating model that integrates the capabilities of the Agile methodology and DevOps practices. It enables organizations to quickly adapt to changing business environments. According to McKinsey, an agile approach can improve business productivity by 25-30% in 6-18 months. On its own, DevOps is powerful when integrated with cloud computing. By combining it with Agile, DevOps delivers benefits like:
- Faster product releases
- Improved team collaboration
- Faster resolution of product bugs and errors
- Improved product quality
As it stands, AgileOps accrues various benefits for the infrastructure and operation teams. It enables them to focus on deploying, operating, and supporting digital applications (& services) in an environment of continuous development and delivery.
For a long period, operations teams have depended on manual monitoring of their IT infrastructure and applications. This is no longer adequate. Among the many challenges, they need to handle complex IT environments comprising a mix of legacy systems, cloud services, and containerized applications.
To enable the continuous delivery of infrastructure-related changes, operational teams must now embrace the automation of their agile workflows. This is possible only by implementing Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
Which companies can benefit from IaC and how?
IaC is designed for companies (of all sizes) managing their IT ecosystem and application development on the cloud platform. In particular, IaC enables application developers and operation teams to manage and provision their cloud resources automatically.
Within the scope of IaC, companies can achieve benefits like:
- Better business agility
- Reduced human errors
- Consistent infrastructure provisioning
- Infrastructure management across the entire product development lifecycle
How does automation benefit them? Prior to IaC, they had to manually configure every operating system and device for the cloud infrastructure. This is no longer needed. Organizations looking to upgrade their IT infrastructure do not have to allocate time and resources on repetitive tasks like configuration and maintenance.
Challenges of “Traditional” Infrastructure Management
The “traditional” approach to infrastructure management involves manual procedures, leading to human errors and high costs. For instance, operations teams need to manually configure every server for running operating systems and applications.
The heavy dependence on infrastructure experts and professionals adds to the overhead costs for the enterprise. Besides, manual configuration (even when performed by experts) is slower than automated configuration. Hence, organizations struggle to maintain scalability, keeping their applications unavailable to users for a longer duration.
Another challenge relates to the difficulty of finding the “root cause” of any infrastructure-related problem. Without continuous monitoring, infrastructure teams cannot quickly identify the root cause of issues and anomalies, which leads to significant delays.
In traditional environments, infrastructure-related configurations are typically distributed across servers and systems – as well as across environments (for example, development, testing, production). The lack of a single-source (or centralized) source makes it challenging to detect the root cause of issues when they occur. This also leads to troubleshooting-related problems. By centralizing the infrastructure configuration, IaC provides a feasible solution to infrastructure management.
Manual provisioning of servers also leads to other challenges, including:
- Provisioned servers could go out of sync at a later point.
- Creation of snowflake servers, which are difficult to replicate and manage.
- Identifying the entity responsible for errors in version control and rolling it back to the best version.
Alternatively, Infrastructure as Code is the answer for organizations looking to automate their agile operations.
Why Are Businesses Adopting IaC?
IaC is at the heart of DevOps and CI/CD practices. It enables enterprises to seamlessly manage and provision their infrastructural resources. Operations teams no longer have to manually configure their servers, networks, and other infrastructural components.
Popular IaC tools like AWS CloudFormation and Terraform can ensure continuous and consistent deployments across various IT environments. That said, here are some ways in which IaC is transforming agile operations:
1. Automating Infrastructure Management
IaC tools can automate the process of provisioning and configuring infrastructure resources, thus replacing the error-prone manual processes. With IaC, enterprises can easily replicate and scale their agile environments, reducing any inconsistencies between the development, testing, and production stages.
2. Maintaining Infrastructure Code Through Version Control.
IaC tools like Terraform and AWS CloudFormation leverage the capabilities of version control tools to maintain infrastructure code changes. Thus, operations teams can track code changes, collaborate, and maintain the history of infrastructural changes.
For instance, AWS CloudFormation uses the S3 bucket feature to maintain the remote state. Similarly, Terraform’s DynamoDB functionality uses the locking mechanism to prevent multiple engineers from applying code changes at the same time.
3. Ensuring Consistency and Reproducibility
By using IaC tools, enterprises can make infrastructure deployments more consistent and reproducible. With infrastructure-related configurations in the code, they can ensure that all environments are similarly provisioned, thus eliminating the problem of configuration drift.
4. Enhancing Business Agility and Flexibility
IaC enables organizations to become more agile and flexible. By managing infrastructural changes through code, operations teams can modify their infrastructure configurations to:
- Support new features
- Achieve scalability of resources
- Accommodate any changes in the application requirements.
This translates into benefits like business agility and faster time-to-market.
How Can Companies Implement IaC?
Companies can implement IaC in their IT environment using a host of IaC tools:
- Open-source IaC tools like Terraform and Ansible support IaC execution in any environment. With support for multiple add-ons and extensions, these tools are highly extensible and functional.
- Closed-source IaC tools like AWS CloudFormation and Google Cloud Deployment Manager are useful within a particular environment or platform. For example, CloudFormation provides IaC functions specifically for the AWS platform.
Here are some of the best practices used in implementing IaC:
1. Maintain a Single “Source of Truth”
Code all the infrastructure-related specifications only in configuration files. This acts as the single source of truth for all infrastructural management. Avoid additional files or documents that can cause misinformation or any discrepancy.
2. Adopt an Immutable Approach to Infrastructure Management
An immutable infrastructure approach emphasizes that teams should rebuild a resource each time they need to update it. With IaC, they can update resources after running them. This approach is effective for applying minor changes. With an immutable approach, operation teams can create new IaC resources from scratch whenever they need a major update.
3. Store IaC Files in Version Control
For improved reliability, store all IaC files with a version control tool. By storing various versions of IaC code, the executing team can track how the code has changed over time. Besides, version control tools enable them to revert to the earlier code version in case of any code failure or problems.
4. Test the IaC Configuration
Finally, companies must test their IaC code for any configuration-related errors or inconsistencies. Most IaC tools are equipped with testing and monitoring capabilities, which allow teams to validate the code before submitting it to the production environment.
Wrapping Up
To stay agile and competitive, more organizations are adopting automation technologies like the cloud-powered Infrastructure as Code. With IaC, they can seamlessly manage their infrastructural changes and provisioning, something that’s not possible with a manually monitored infrastructure approach. With the IaC approach, organizations can achieve consistency in managing their infrastructure and IT environments using code. This delivers benefits in the form of reliability, efficiency, and scalability.
Interested in learning more about how to leverage the benefits of IaC in your IT environment? Get in touch with our experts today.
