Tools for Infrastructure as Code
Learn about the inner workings of popular IaC tools.
Introduction
We might frequently need to set up servers and network/storage components or to configure and roll out software/scripts to them. Depending on what the use case is, there are a couple of tools used to achieve the required level of automation.
As mentioned earlier, there are two classifications of the IaC tools:
- Orchestration tools
- Configuration management tools
Let’s check out examples of each. Orchestration tools include the following:
CloudFormation
This is an IaC service provided by AWS for the provisioning and management of resources on the AWS cloud platform. It primarily makes use of template files which define the configuration and deployment of resources. Templates can be stacked together into a single unit called Stack and can be written in either JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) or YAML (YAML Ain’t Markup Language). The changes that an updated template will effect are referred to as a changeset.
