IaC is a method of managing infrastructure in which infrastructure is declared and managed using code. One of the biggest benefits of IaC is increased productivity.
Some of the benefits of IaC include simplifying infrastructure management, the ability to reuse code, and tracking infrastructure changes. For example, instead of having to manually create, configure, and connect services in the infrastructure, you can use CloudFormation templates to automatically create and connect these services together. When you no longer need them, you can simply delete the template from CloudFormation. You can also use the template to deploy services in multiple regions, multiple accounts, and track infrastructure changes from CloudFormation.
In addition, IaC also brings many other benefits, such as security. For example, instead of writing IAM policies to allow a Lambda function to read data from an S3 bucket, when using CDK (Cloud Development Kit), you can write bucket.grantReadOnly(lambdaFunction). CDK will automatically create the policy with best practices.
Another important aspect of IaC is its role in CI/CD and DevOps. IaC is an important requirement in DevOps-related work, where automating infrastructure deployment and testing becomes difficult without using IaC.
There are many different IaC frameworks available today, including CloudFormation, CloudFormation SAM, CDK, and CDK8S, which are developed and supported by AWS. These frameworks share common features such as declaring infrastructure using code and tracking infrastructure changes. However, the frameworks differ in terms of infrastructure deployment tools and integration with AWS. CloudFormation, SAM, and CDK all deploy infrastructure through the CloudFormation service. Terraform, Pulumi, and Serverless have their own deployment tools and do not use CloudFormation.
To get started with IaC, you can familiarize yourself with CloudFormation templates by declaring infrastructure, parameters, and maps. You can also manage configuration changes and create updates through CloudFormation. Additionally, you can deploy the same stack to multiple accounts and regions using StackSet.
To get started with CDK, you need to understand abstract concepts such as Construct, Stack, Props, Interface, Type, and ID. You need to understand and control the dependencies between Stacks and manage infrastructure changes when updating Stacks. You can also divide an architecture into smaller Stacks and deploy multiple Stacks in parallel.
Finally, you can build and integrate IaC into your CI/CD process.
There are a number of different IaC frameworks available, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Some popular IaC frameworks include: