In the fast-paced world of software development, streamlining the deployment process and ensuring a consistent and error-free infrastructure is paramount. We often encounter common issues that hinder project progress, but with the right solutions, we can drastically reduce release cycles and testing times.
Test Driven Delivery(TDD):
Host a production environment right at your dev laptop and the same in QA. So all engineers(Devs, QAs, BAs etc) have a prod like environment to test the same code that will eventually go into production.This way more bugs are caught before it goes to production.
Write tests to validate functionality of each module. This must run each up the module gets configuration update to ensure the base functionality works
Integration tests are needed to test service to service, app to service, service to db or integration with third part services.
Infrastructure must be performance tested to meet the benchmarks before going live in production.
User acceptance tests to ensure business scenarios must be ensured.
But it’s easier said than done. You don’t always start from scratch, in many cases organisations face with legacy challenges such as:
Manual Steps to Set Up Server: One of the recurring problems is the manual configuration of servers. These "works of art" take hours to set up, resulting in deployment times stretching to months.
No Track of Changes: Losing track of changes made to the infrastructure is a common issue. This often leads to unexpected downtimes and extensive troubleshooting.
Testing Takes Forever: Slow testing of infrastructure code is a bottleneck. To speed up the process, we introduce scalable environments on demand.
Solution to these challenges is to first get the delivery process right. Here are 4 key infrastructure development steps that are must for resilient and consistent delivery of prod ready infrastructure:
Environment On Demand:
Environments that can be quickly spun up, tested with infrastructure code, and torn down in just a few minutes. This approach significantly reduces testing times and accelerates the release cycle.
This enables performance based auto scale, continuous delivery, backward compatibility and immutable infrastructure.
Basically you treat environments with commodity items.
Of course not Production :) because that will be disastrous.
For secure, scalable and sustainable software development and delivery you need multiple production-like environments on demand so end to end testing can happen faster and efficiently.
So here's what we need to create Environment On Demand
Modular Infrastructure as Code (IaC):
Don’t just automate, modularise and parameterise server configurations, relationships with other servers in code.
Server configuration, packages installed, relationships with other servers etc should be modelled with code to be automated, removing error prone manual steps.
For example, If you are using terraform don't create one module and try to execute every resource from that. Instead create independent modules for each infra component and a separate module to provision these. These can be called modules and provisioners. Here is how modules and provisioners structure for can look like.
Configuration Management:
Automate model server configurations, parameterise everything, relationships with other servers, packages in code. This is called Configuration Management.
Configuration is especially useful for software upgrades, patching, files/folder creation, user management and more. This code should always be version controlled.
For instance, we can (and should!)
Tag, branch and release the code that defines our servers.
Have a lifecycle that covers different stages through the infrastructure code, ie. dev, QA, production.
Continuously test your infrastructure as you make changes.
Pipeline As Code:
When it comes to infrastructure provisioning it's better not to just execute commands manually from a local host or any remote machine. Instead create parameterised jobs/tasks that can be executed in stages in a pipeline.
Create version controlled CI/CD pipelines as code for provisioning infrastructure. There must be separate stages for specific tasks. For example, you can have one pipeline for creating a Kubernetes cluster with separate stages for different environments like dev, test, prod etc.
Pipeline as code can be used beyond provisioning, for upgrades, patching, data migration, in short any automated task that happens in infrastructure.
And not to mention the logs and historical tracing reports that can be generated from pipeline code are a must during infrastructure audits. It's not possible to do the same from any cli or terminal of a standalone machine.
Other benefits include parallel execution of a variety of tasks from a CI/CD platform, which otherwise is not possible from a standalone machine.
In conclusion, by implementing these practices, you can achieve:
More stable and tested builds.
Production-like environments on your machine within minutes.
Consistency across all environments.
Automated and scalable environments on demand.
Fully tested configuration management.
A significant reduction in production deployment times.
A multifold decrease in overall testing time.
The adoption of Configuration Management, Infrastructure as Code, and Test-Driven Delivery(TDD) for Infrastructure Code can transform your deployment process, making it more efficient, predictable, and resilient.
Here's a demo on how to do
Test Driven Delivery of Infrastructure As Code:
If you like this article, I am sure you will find this full course even more useful. It compiles all these tried and tested methodologies, design patterns & best practices into a complete framework for building secure, scalable and resilient modern infrastructure.
Don’t let your best-selling product suffer due to an unstable, vulnerable & mutable infrastructure.
Sign up now to get an early access to the TDD For IaC course.
Thanks & Regards
Kamalika Majumder
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