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Top 5 Incidents and Outages of 2021
An overview of major IT incidents and outages in 2021
December 10, 2021
4 min read
An overview of how SREs can benefit from Infrastructure-as-Code.
Although SRE tool sets vary from one team to another, there is one type of tool -- Infrastructure-as-Code, or IaC -- that virtually every SRE needs to manage reliability at scale. If you’re not leveraging IaC, you’re not being all you can be as an SRE.
Keep reading for a breakdown of how IaC works, why it’s so important to SRE and how SREs can add IaC to their reliability engineering strategy.
Infrastructure-as-Code is the use of computer code to set up and manage infrastructure.
In other words, under an IaC approach, engineers write machine-readable code that defines how a server, virtual machine, container or other type of infrastructure should be configured. Then, they apply the configuration using an IaC automation tool that reads the files and applies the specified configuration to each machine.
IaC can be used to update infrastructure in a similar way by changing IaC files, then redeploying them to the infrastructure that needs to be modified.
There is no shortage of articles out there on the benefits of IaC in general. Usually, they boil down to the idea that IaC saves teams time and effort by making it possible to automate the configuration of large-scale infrastructure.
These benefits apply to SREs in addition to almost any type of IT or development team. However, for SREs in particular, IaC offers some critical advantages when it comes to engineering reliability:
The wide availability of IaC tools makes it easy for SREs to take advantage of IaC. Popular IaC platforms today include options like Terraform, Ansible and CloudFormation, to name just a few. All of these platforms are production-ready and don’t have a particularly steep learning curve. If you can code -- as most SREs can -- you can probably learn to use IaC pretty quickly.
The best IaC platform for a given SRE team will depend largely on which types of environment the team manages. Some IaC tools only support certain public clouds, while others can work anywhere. SREs should consider as well which configuration languages the tools support and whether they enjoy working with those languages. The way you scan IaC files may also depend on which IaC tool you use, so SREs should do their research to determining which scanning and validation processes IaC platforms support before choosing one.
IaC is a great type of tool for engineering teams of all types. But for SREs in particular, IaC offers special advantages for enforcing configurations that maximize reliability across all IT assets. It also makes it easy to minimize the risk of human error and to validate configurations prior to taking them live.
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