Avoiding Disasters with IaC and Terraform
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has provided an established pathway to the cloud, bringing scale, security and stability to infrastructure configuration and management. At the same time, its offering of comprehensive, fine-grained control means it’s complex to implement and prone to introducing bottlenecks to application development teams.
Because of these challenges, many small- and medium-sized teams opt for manual cloud configuration. While they give up the benefits of automation, it feels like a productive choice in the short term. But let me show you how to achieve the long-term value of IaC without a big upfront investment and disruption to your application development.
The Appeal of Cloud Consoles
If you’re among those who find themselves drawn to cloud consoles, I understand the appeal. Cloud consoles promise a user-friendly interface with easy navigation and visual feedback, making them highly accessible. They act as a central management platform, providing a single pane of glass to manage, monitor and troubleshoot cloud resources. However, this convenience comes with trade-offs.
The Trade-Offs of Manual Configuration
Scalability Challenges
Manual configurations become cumbersome as infrastructure scales or requires redeployment because managing numerous components individually becomes increasingly complex and time-consuming. This often leads to inefficiencies and increases the risk of misconfigurations, missed critical updates or security vulnerabilities. As the infrastructure grows, the challenge of ensuring consistency and maintaining security standards across all components also magnifies.
Lack of Depth in Advanced Settings
Cloud consoles often lack depth in advanced settings and customization options. Users may spend considerable time configuring complex resources or integrating advanced features.
An example of this issue is configuring an API gateway with multiple stages, custom authorizers and advanced request/response transformations. In the cloud console, you must manually configure settings such as:
- Fine-grained identity and access management (IAM) policies and roles directly tied to API gateway components.
- Intricate mapping templates and transformations for both requests and responses.
- Custom domain names and base path mappings.
In contrast, using IaC tools like Terraform, these configurations can be defined in a single version-controlled script.
Incurred Technical Debt
Manual configurations eventually need to be repeated. The more configuration done in the console, the greater the technical debt that accumulates, which will eventually need to be paid back. This ongoing chore can become a significant burden, typically requiring late-night troubleshooting to get applications live.
Compromised Security
If you’re still not convinced, the most pressing reason to adopt automation is security. Real-time updates via your console immediately affect users of your system without the breathing room to perform adequate checks or tests. A weak and untested update to a security policy can compromise your entire application, with few indicators that something is wrong.
Misconfiguration of cloud storage services, such as Amazon S3, are a common source of security vulnerabilities, leading to severe consequences like data breaches, financial losses and reputational damage.
IaC Promises a Better Way
Infrastructure as Code offers a repeatable way to manage infrastructure by treating configuration files as source code that can be version controlled and tested, solving many of the challenges mentioned above.
By adopting IaC, you’ll find that it significantly improves infrastructure management by ensuring consistent, error-free deployments across environments. It facilitates version control and collaboration, automated provisioning, and integrates seamlessly with CI/CD pipelines. This leads to faster, efficient and scalable infrastructure management that sets a strong foundational base for the long term.
Beware the IaC Learning Curve
Whichever IaC tool you choose — from industry leaders like Terraform to up-and-coming technologies like Pulumi — has its own syntax, best practices and ecosystems, requiring substantial learning and adaptation. With a learning curve that is both steep and long, successful adoption will require your time and energy, likely distracting you from your primary objective of application development.
Let’s elaborate a security example to illustrate the learning required for IaC. Misconfiguring S3 buckets and making your data publicly accessible, although somewhat mitigated by recent changes in AWS, is an easy mistake to make. To reduce the risk of data breaches, here is a checklist of features and policies that we can adopt to secure an S3 bucket.
Encryption:
- Server-side encryption: Use SSE-S3, SSE-KMS or SSE-C to encrypt data at rest.
Access Control:
- IAM policies: Create and attach fine-grained policies to users, groups and roles.
- Bucket policies: Define who can access the bucket and which actions they can perform.
- Access control lists (ACLs): Set permissions at the bucket and object level.
- S3 access points: Manage data access by creating custom access points with specific permissions.
- Use S3 object lock to prevent objects from being deleted or overwritten for a specified retention period.
TLS Enforcement:
- Ensure all data in transit uses TLS to protect against interception.
- Enforce HTTPS requests using bucket policies with explicit deny conditions for non-HTTPS requests.
Replication:
- Cross-region replication (CRR): Replicate data across different AWS regions to enhance availability and compliance.
- Same-region replication (SRR): Replicate data within the same region for redundancy and local compliance requirements.
Logging and Monitoring:
- Enable S3 server access logging to capture details of requests made to your bucket.
- Use AWS CloudTrail to log API calls and monitor activities.
Each item in this list requires separate configuration, but more importantly, it requires you to have an in-depth understanding of the feature that is being configured — specifically, what effect each option will have on the storage bucket and how it should be properly configured to ensure the application functions as desired, without being open to consumption from unauthorized users.
Holistically, your application is going to consist of more than just an S3 bucket. You’ll need to break down all resources you use — including API gateways, Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) topic, etc. — into features and understand their configurability, each to an equivalent level of detail.
Jumpstart Your IaC Journey
Modern application development demands a balance between rapid iteration and long-term sustainability. Leveraging automation frameworks is a key strategy for overcoming the limitations of manual configuration in infrastructure management. But how can you avoid getting stuck in the learning curve of IaC and disrupting your application development while the team muddles through infrastructure?
Based on the success of IaC creating scalable, secure and efficient cloud management, many community-driven frameworks and tools have emerged to help make the transition easier. In particular, to lessen the IaC learning curve and a potential slowdown to application development, check out the Infrastructure from Code (IfC) space. By encapsulating industry best practices into reusable, prebuilt modules and templates, IfC can help you get started quickly with IaC to get the benefits of automation without a massive time investment.
What Is IfC?
Infrastructure from Code (IfC) is an emerging approach that integrates infrastructure management directly into the application code. This means that as you write your application code, the necessary infrastructure is automatically defined and deployed, ensuring that the infrastructure is always in sync with the application requirements.
Frameworks like Nitric help minimize the learning curve and decision fatigue often associated with adopting IaC tools, providing a straightforward and intuitive interface for defining and managing infrastructure. This approach is much faster than building an application and then manually figuring out what is needed and how to configure it in the cloud console, or how to author IaC scripts from scratch.
Basically, when you write code, the IfC framework inspects the code to generate a specification and assigns version-controlled IaC modules to fulfill the requirements. These modules are completely customizable and provide a starting point where security best practices are built into the framework, meaning common vulnerabilities are mitigated by default. This reduces the likelihood of security misconfigurations and enhances the overall security posture of the infrastructure.
Consistent infrastructure deployment across different environments is a key advantage. This consistency reduces the risk of configuration drift and helps maintain a standardized setup, which is critical for both operational efficiency and security compliance.
By using prebuilt IaC modules that meet the runtime requirements of their application, developers can quickly spin up environments that follow industry and organization best practices, significantly reducing the time needed to go from development to production. This acceleration is crucial for teams aiming to meet tight deadlines and deliver value faster.
Let’s Compare Manual Config vs. IaC vs. IfC
To better understand the benefits and trade-offs of different infrastructure management approaches, let’s compare manual configuration, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and Infrastructure from Code (IfC).
| Aspect | Manual Configuration | Infrastructure as Code (IaC) | Infrastructure from Code (IfC) |
| Ease of Use | User-friendly interfaces, no coding required | Requires knowledge of configuration languages | Automated for common use cases |
| Scalability | Difficult to scale | Easily scalable with scripts | Automatically scales with application changes |
| Extensible | N/A | Extensible with scripts | Extensible with IaC |
| Security | Higher risk of misconfigurations | Security with IAM roles and permissions | Automated security with IAM roles and permissions |
| Consistency | Risk of configuration drift | Risk of configuration drift | Consistent and automatically updated across environments and applications |
| Speed | Fast for simple applications. Slower deployment as complexity and environments increase | Fast and automated deployments. Considerable time required to write IaC scripts | Instantaneous deployment with application changes |
| Learning Curve | Low for basic use | Steep for advanced configurations | Minimal, as it leverages existing coding skills and IaC modules and templates |
| Operational Overhead | High, manual updates needed | Moderate, requires maintaining IaC scripts | Low, minimal maintenance needed beyond codebase; moderate with extensions requiring IaC scripts |
| Community Support | Limited to platform-specific resources | Strong community support and resources | Growing community with support focused on integration |
Try an IfC Spike
Embracing Infrastructure from Code offers numerous benefits, including simplified complexity, accelerated development, consistency, enhanced security, scalability, reduced operational overhead, community support, cost efficiency, improved testing and future-proofing.
I challenge you to do a spike with Nitric and see firsthand how much faster and more efficient it is compared to manual cloud configuration. Try out a guide and jump into the Discord to share how it went, ask questions of the community and propose enhancements. And let me know if you’re convinced to give up manual cloud configuration.
