Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and Change Management
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) & Change Management written by Nick Bascombe-Fox, CTO
Spring of 2014: A client’s surprise £1 dress sale turned their website into a traffic hotspot.
As the sole server expert at We Are HA at that time, I spent a gruelling 36 hours manually configuring servers to keep up with the surge.
While it was a “good problem to have”, it was clearly unsustainable. However, the experience became a catalyst for We Are HA’s automation journey and Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
With IaC, our entire team, not just me, could seamlessly scale the infrastructure – adding database and web servers as needed – to handle future traffic spikes. Imagine the peace of mind!
Let’s explore how IaC can empower your operations team to conquer ever-changing server demands…
Keeping pace with constantly changing server and system architectures is crucial for operations teams. At We Are HA, we fully understand that challenge, and that’s why, for over a decade, we have been leveraging IaC to streamline infrastructure management and ensure agility.
Traditionally, system configurations were a tangled mess of documents, scripts, and tribal knowledge. This nightmare scenario makes tracking changes, maintaining consistency, and collaborating effectively a constant struggle.
Thankfully IaC, combined with configuration management, offers a powerful solution.
Treating infrastructure as code allows you to define the desired state of your infrastructure using code. This code enables automated provisioning and management, ensuring consistency and optimising internal resources.
But the true magic lies in configuration management.
Version control systems, such as “Git”, track changes to your configuration files, like tracking code changes for software development. By using Heira with Puppet, at We Are HA we blend configuration with Infrastructure as Code.
Heira is YAML (YAML Ain’t Markup Language). This human-readable data format is concise and easy to write, making it user-friendly for technical and non-technical users. Furthermore, YAML’s ability to handle data structures, like lists and maps, makes it versatile enough to represent even the most complex infrastructure configurations.
Everything begins with a request, a ticket raised by a client or an internal task, and everything has an ID number. At We Are HA, we combine the following to operate our tailored Managed Hosting:
This trio empowers our operations team to:
By embracing IaC with Git and YAML, you can empower your operations team to conquer the ever-changing landscape of server and system architectures. This approach fosters collaboration, improves efficiency, and leads to a more reliable and scalable infrastructure.
There are numerous resources available online to guide you through implementing IaC with Git and YAML for your specific infrastructure needs. Adopt version control to ensure your operations are as agile and adaptable as the applications they support!
Looking for an efficient and effective hosting provider with over a decade of experience?
Look no further! Contact us and a member of our UK based engineering team will be happy to help.
Thanks to Puppet, Git Hub, Git Lab and our DevOps team for your awesomeness!