5 posts tagged with "iac"

Introduction​

In this tutorial, we'll deploy a simple web app to the cloud of your choice - composed of a database and a virtual machine where the frontend code will run. So that the configuration is reusable and consistent, we'll write it in Terraform.

Usually Terraform configurations are cloud-specific, and changing clouds requires a complete rewrite. In this case, so that you can reuse the same configuration across clouds, we'll be using Multy.

In-depth knowledge of Terraform and Multy is not needed to follow this tutorial. If you want to learn more about these tools, check out the Multy documentation and the Terraform documentation.

Cloud has become the de facto way to build infrastructure, meaning cloud providers end up in charge of a significant amount of the apps we use every day. From the likes of Netflix, Slack, Ring and Doordash running on AWS or PayPal, Twitter and HSBC on GCP, it's easy to see how impactful a failure of any type can be.

Let's look at some of the issues that have happened recently that have led business to consider how dependent they are on a single provider.

In this blog post series, we will be comparing different services in AWS, GCP and Azure. We'll go into detail in each of the resources and understand the differences between providers, something you need to be aware if you are looking into switching clouds.

Some examples will be given using Terraform, the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) market leader. If you want to know more about different IaC tools and how they compare, check our other blog post - Terraform vs Pulumi vs CloudFormation.

There are many computing resources available across all clouds which usually fall into one of these categories:

• Containers (managed container services, kubernetes)
• Instances (virtual machines, spot instances)
• Serverless

In this article, we're specifically focusing on Virtual Machine instances. If you are interested in other resources, join our mailing list as we will be comparing other resources later on.

Cloud infrastructure has been on the rise for the last decade. As it's adoption grows, so has the complexity of managing infrastructure, becoming more complex and more prone to user mistakes. This led to a new wave of tools in the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) space that aim to tackle this issue by treating your infrastructure as you would any other piece of software.

In this post, we'll go over an overview of what is IaC, why you should consider using it and a brief introduction to how some of these tools work under the hood.

Overview​

When getting started, using an Infrastructure as Code (Iac) tool might seem overkill, and something that will slow down development. Building and deploying manually is often the way to go early stage - infrastructure changes constantly and having to re-write your configuration can be a pointless exercise until you have a better understanding of the fundamental pieces of your infrastructure.

However, most infrastructures get to a point where manual deployments and resource definition start actually slowing you down. Manual deployments, having to create copies for each environment or having dozens of developers deploying changes to code/infrastructure - these are all things that can lead to mistakes, downtime or even loss of data.

In this blog post, we'll take a look at the current IaC landscape, current tools and how they compare against each other.