IaC, the end of the conflict between governance and practicality

Are you sure that what is written in your project's documentation is the proof of reality of what has been implemented in the environment? With the high turnover of IT professionals, when someone leaves the team, it is difficult to find out what changes were made to the infrastructure. Therefore, the process known as documentation was established to create a record of information, shorten learning curves, and generate an alleged independence for the company. In theory.

However, in this attempt to manage an environment with clarity, companies continue to struggle with a lack of information and governance.

When writing a lengthy document of all the steps executed in creating the infrastructure, the technical professional is prone to mistakes. After all, teams must look after the code, and with every change made, records need to be updated. This is not a practical routine to which they are accustomed.

In addition to requiring excessive time, this results in documents that are difficult to understand or even incomplete. As the environment evolves, these lapses can snowball.

In this scenario, Getup created an infrastructure as code service (IaC), a solution to make environments easily replicable with agile, scalable, efficient, and reliable management.

What is IaC (Infrastructure as code)?

IaC is the process of managing and provisioning infrastructure through code, eliminating manual processes. Code is created to reduce time in setting up and maintaining environments. Creating an infrastructure using IaC is not as practical as doing it manually, for example, through a console. However, reusability is unmatched. When a resource is created through this process, the time and effort to replicate it can be reduced to minutes or even seconds. In short, IaC democratizes information by delivering a descriptive model of how a resource was built.

Getup's IaC

With its IaC service, Getup brings a declarative approach that enables work on improving environments through code visualization. We are early adopters of infrastructure as code, using the Terraform tool (which provisions IaC in the cloud) even before its popularization. We believe that many companies began adopting it through contact with Getup's services. Our proposal is to manage and develop environments not only using IaC tools, but also following the best practices listed by the cloud providers that shaped today's market (Microsoft, Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, among others).

This regulation is of utmost importance so that, when you consult support on your platform, your provider can audit the environment and show zero non-conformities.

The use of code to create resources in environments provides a productivity gain for teams and reduces errors made in manual processes, as the code is always the same and professionals only need to fill out a variables file. Another huge benefit is the ability to document and track changes, since the entire lifecycle of the resources is stored in the code repository. For those who need to build Multicloud environments, this standardization is a fundamental step in that direction.

Therefore, IaC goes beyond infrastructure. Our service is focused on supporting governance, addressing the specific needs of each environment, bringing practicality, replicability, and reliability.

What gain should I expect when adopting IaC?

This technique eliminates slow processes that hinder the business and information sharing due to faulty records. Infrastructure as code is easy to adopt. When executed correctly (with best practices), it is replicable with simplicity, allowing for a fast and controlled evolution of an environment. In addition, this practice tends to become popular, since it is less costly to adopt IaC than to depend on a technical professional to know the true context of an infrastructure, due to high turnover in the IT market. It also reduces costs for those with local network environments, as manual maintenance usually takes time and can affect availability, causing the company to lose time and money. Another solved problem is the conflict with the technical team, which tends to go straight to the code in search of the real proof. No wonder tl;dr (too long; didn't read) summaries exist to summarize files with extensive documentation, being an intrinsic part of developer culture. As Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, said: "Talk is cheap. Show me the code". To learn more about IaC, talk to an expert.