What Is Infrastructure as Code (IaC)?

Overseeing an entire IT infrastructure can be a difficult task. System administrators need to physically manage and organize all of the appropriate hardware and software for the entire system. These tasks used to be even more difficult before cloud computing brought more power to the user. Cloud computing brought more power to the users and made managing IT infrastructure easier. Although cloud computing can be beneficial in helping mitigate some of the issues of managing an IT infrastructure, there are certain aspects it still lacks—this is where Infrastructure as Code can advantageous for its users.

What Are the Difficulties of Managing IT Infrastructure?

Managing an entire IT infrastructure could be quite a time-consuming process. One would have to physically install servers and take care of all configurations. After configuring all of the proper settings needed by the operating system and applications only then the application could be deployed.

Several things could cause some issues when building and maintaining your own data center. One of these being the manual process of physically installing servers, configuring the system, and deploying. Besides the initial build, managing IT infrastructure can cause certain issues.

The first issue is cost. There are several moving parts and personnel that could potentially be involved in this process including network engineers, hardware maintenance technicians, and more. Not only do you have to pay for their services, managing all of their communication with each other is another task for you.

Scalability and availability are a couple more issues to deal with when managing an IT infrastructure. Speed is one of the most important aspects of an IT infrastructure, but because manual configuration can be slow. Setting up servers and scaling and improving the system could potentially affect availability. If your company doesn’t already have backup servers in place, the configuration and upgrade stages could have the system inaccessible for extended periods.

The other issue that can arise is inconsistency. Because you have multiple personnel with their expertise from different places, you will need to manage all of the various moving parts. If this is managed correctly or there is a lack of communication, other issues and inconsistencies could occur.

The Power of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is far more powerful and valuable to businesses than just simple storage. Cloud computing can be advantageous for businesses that want to be more efficient, flexible, and looking to optimize their resources. One of the most important aspects of cloud computing is its ability to give users power and services through the simple use of the cloud. Companies can utilize more power than what they have on their physical computers.

One of the most powerful aspects of cloud computing is the “as-a-service” model. There are many examples and variations of as-a-Service services which include everything from IoT as a service, knowledge as a service, desktop as a service, artificial intelligence as a service, containers as a service, network as a service, backend as a service, and more.

One of the reasons why these are so beneficial for companies is the fact that the company doesn’t need to purchase an entire system, but instead, it can utilize these services through the cloud. For example, building an entire artificial intelligence infrastructure will be expensive, but utilizing artificial intelligence as a service will only cost a fraction of the build. And if one of these services isn’t working out for a particular company, it can be easily (without too much loss) ended.

What Is Infrastructure as Code?

Infrastructure as Code aims to help manage your computer data center or IT infrastructure using configuration files. While cloud computing can and has certainly helped with some of these aspects of managing an IT infrastructure, there could still be possible issues from availability and scalability. This is where Infrastructure as Code can be beneficial. Infrastructure as Code can ease the issues from manual configuration plus several various benefits.

The first and maybe the most important benefit of Infrastructure as Code is quicker provisioning. Instead of using more time constructing and organizing an infrastructure that is suitable for your operation, a company can use one of the source codes from a developer to speed up the process. This can be configured for whatever resources or settings you may need for your particular system or project.

The second benefit of infrastructure as Code addresses one of the issues brought up earlier—scalability. One of the main problems when scaling and upgrading a system is the issue of speed and availability. Infrastructure as Code improves the speed of scaling the entire infrastructure. It gives users the ability to deploy new updated solutions faster than ever before. Infrastructure as Code makes implementing copies of environments simple and easy when needing to increase the capacity of the existing system.

Along with scalability, Infrastructure as Code also gives users more consistency. As mentioned earlier, a manually configured environment could potentially cause certain issues. Deploying specific environments can be simple and changed at the source code level. This makes these systems more consistent and less prone to human error.

Data centers can take advantage of the versatility of Infrastructure as Code. With its wide range of deployment options, this can be ideal for data center management. Businesses that use colocation services and Infrastructure as Code together can easily update their network and processing capabilities.

Conclusion

Infrastructure as Code can help strengthen your infrastructure and allow your company the scalability it needs without sacrificing downtime. It can also help with improving the connectivity of the particular cloud services you are using. Finding a carrier-neutral data center that operates entirely independent of network providers can also be beneficial. A data center provider like Colocation America can partner with a wider range of providers. This type of partnership can help improve your infrastructure along with Infrastructure as Code. If you are looking for a data center provider to enhance your data infrastructure, connect with us today.