Cloudy and hybrid cloud How to use infrastructure for configuration management

As operational processes become more flexible, it teams are faced with ever-greater complexity. When applications change dynamically, agile or continuous application development can be used. But what happens when the IT resources themselves change dynamically?

Cloudy and hybrid clouds are part of this new, dynamic it landscape – and they pose a fresh risk. To solve the problem here, some enterprises use the infrastructure as the code schema.

Configuration management (CM) has always been a required configuration in a large-scale IT infrastructure. There are some cm tools that come from cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, or from virtualized or private cloud software vendors such as OpenStack or VMware.

The infrastructure is code that expands cm by creating a virtual hosting model for your application. This virtual hosting model is scattered across multiple cloud environments and data center platforms.

While the infrastructure, or code, is an extension of cm, it is actually an extension of devops that is starting to get popular. Users cannot deploy applications on servers or cloud services that are not yet built. Therefore, devops tools and scripts must contain these configuration tasks. This enables the DevOps scripts and tools to be and configures bindings, and if you change from one cloud platform to another, the user must change the script. Infrastructure as a service provides a way to separate the virtual world of an application from the underlying resources, including the cloud. With more hosting solutions in existence, the infrastructure as code becomes more valuable.

The infrastructure-as-a-code model creates a middle tier for the deployment description, and the user deploys the application to the abstract managed model created by the code, and the infrastructure is then adapted to any cloud, cloudy, or hybrid configuration environment currently in use. Changes in infrastructure are not visible in the application and operational tiers, and adding new cloud vendors requires only the definition of the infrastructure as code.

However, there are three important steps that users of the infrastructure as code need to be aware of:

1. Isolate infrastructure as code from DevOps

It teams can deploy infrastructure-as-code into any environment where configuration scripts are defined, and enable applications to adapt to almost any public cloud service or data center platform.

The IT team needs to define an abstract model of IT resources based on which infrastructure the code will deploy the configuration. Infrastructure-code tools and practices vary greatly. Some users build infrastructure as code for each application, while others build common models for each type of cloud-hosted environment, such as infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, or Docker.

In general, it is best to reduce the number of abstract managed models that are created, because you must debug each model when you add a new managed selection. Tools allow, consider a hierarchical build model, so that the infrastructure that deploys the application component-or part of an application-is a code model that can be referenced directly in the model that deploys the entire application.

2. Support for infrastructure-as-a-code for all cloud or datacenter environment used

Once you understand the models you need, make sure that they support the configuration of the specific cloud vendors and data centers that you plan to use. Almost all infrastructure-code tools, such as chef and puppet, allow users to define their own configuration rules for any environment, but popular public clouds, private cloud and platform scenarios-such as hypervisor, container systems, and server operating systems- are provided as part of the infrastructure-as-a-code toolset. There may also be community support for other users to contribute their configuration rules. It's easier to start developing from a configuration that's already working, than to build your own from scratch.

3. Extending the event stream from the infrastructure to the deployment tool

The most subtle, difficult, and important thing to accomplish in an infrastructure-as-a-code scenario is the flow of events that handle the integration of the infrastructure-code and other tools; In most cases, this means using devops tools. Application lifecycle Operations Management needs to choose the right software based on the situation-these are the events in the infrastructure-code. These events, generated through managed resources, serve as signals for what to do. They typically activate an automated process, such as replacing a failed application component by hosting it elsewhere. (ASmes execution manufacturing system softwareManagement of the product process. ）

Infrastructure is tightly linked to code events and processes, which is why most organizations planning to use hybrid or multi-cloud deployments will study their DevOps tools ' support for infrastructure-as-code, rather than using separate tools. The integration of infrastructure-code and DevOps ensures the correct design and implementation of event-triggering processes.

Integrating infrastructure as code into DevOps can also help users avoid common-sense errors. If you already have a specific tool, and if the infrastructure as code is integrated into DevOps, it is easier to plan to host resources using the infrastructure as code. This is because it is easier to virtualize the entire deployment process and the resource role of the infrastructure as code. DevOps tools and packages advertise their supported public cloud services, and if DevOps tools include infrastructure-as-a-code components, users know that the tool can work with the public cloud listed.

To be more efficient, the infrastructure, i.e. code, must work closely with DevOps, but at the same time maintain its own characteristics. If you're not careful, you'll develop a blurring of the configuration and deployment practices, and erode the independence of resources--which is actually the biggest advantage of infrastructure as code. Maintaining an agile infrastructure is essential in a cloud-and hybrid-clouds deployment, so this should be a specific goal.

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Cloudy and hybrid cloud How to use infrastructure for configuration management