Hello, welcome to this new edition of Digital Blitz, your 2-minutes brief on everything UX, Tech and Compliance.
Do you know that there was a time, less than 15 years ago, where it took more than two weeks to provision a new dedicated server to host a new website? This is what we were dealing with back in 2005. Since then, thankfully, the rise of cloud-based technologies enable lots of automation and the ability to manage hardware with code, in the same way we write software.
This is part of the DevOps movement and what we call Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
There are three main benefits to using IaC:
- First of all, it's quicker time to market with less human errors. Because once we write the code to define the size of the servers, the database settings and the secure configuration, we just press a button and everything deploys automagically. It reduces all the manual steps. And when you have multiple environments like testing, staging & production that should all behave the same way with the same configuration, it saves a lot of time and money.
- Secondly, it helps with better team collaboration, because like with software, when it's hosted in a repository, multiple team members can collaborate. It has full version control and properly documented process.
- And finally it brings increased compliance because you can have approval workflows and full audit trace of all the configuration changes. It also helps reduce downtime during a disaster recovery exercise. You can restore all your environment in another data center in minutes.
There are lots of various technologies to use infrastructure as code like Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, Puppet, Chef, Ansible...
Using Infra-as-Code is really a no-brainer because you just need to build the templates of your most common platform (like Laravel or Drupal for us), and then everything is configured automatically. You can just deploy your application.
If you're starting on your DevOps journey or need help to automate your server deployment, just get in touch. Don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me on Twitter to keep learning with me and grow your career in digital.
Until next time, stay safe and see you soon.
