Organizations keen to deliver innovative digital services are increasingly turning to cloud, virtualization, and automation tools. While these can lower technical barriers to rapidly delivering and evolving software, new practices and techniques are needed to make sure systems are secure, stable, and maintainable.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) brings tools and practices from agile software engineering to ensure that infrastructure can be continuously evolved with a rigorous focus on quality. This is possible because infrastructure has become abstracted from physical hardware, meaning it can be treated like a software system. Version control systems, Test-Driven Development (TDD), Continuous Integration (CI), and Continuous Delivery (CD) can now be applied to the realm of infrastructure.
The talk walks through a number of patterns for implementing IaC tools such as AWS, Chef, Puppet, Ansible, and Terraform, to build a change management pipeline to automatically test and apply configuration to infrastructure. The patterns are not tool-specific, so should be useful for any team using these types of tools.
Attendees should come away with an understanding of how concepts such as Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CD), Test Driven Development (TDD) can be applied to infrastructure.
Kief is an experienced practitioner and a reference in the field, having authored the book "Infrastructure as Code".