So what are provisioning tools? Infrastructure as Code (IaC) offers developers and operations teams the facility to automate the processes to manage and provision the infrastructure required for their application’s technology stack. The configuration of the discrete hardware devices and operating systems that comprise the infrastructure can now be undertaken using code, replacing the traditional manual approach. This automation makes the Infrastructure provisioning process faster while reducing the probability of configuration errors, leading to cost and time savings.

Terraform and Ansible are both open-source software tools that support the development of Infrastructure as Code (IaC). This facilitates the management and provisioning of infrastructure with software-based configuration control for physical and virtual services. IaC enables infrastructure to be defined using software modules. This enhances maintainability, promotes reusability, and allows near pain-free scalability. Both software tools use a functional approach, using declarative configuration to state the infrastructure’s desired final state. The system then executes the actions required to achieve this desired state. 

Migrating business systems into an ‘all-in’ cloud environment is one of the most cost-efficient solutions for scaling business operations. The costs associated with the purchase, deployment, operation and maintenance of additional physical servers are replaced with the lower costs of purchasing server capacities from the cloud supplier. Cloud processing and storage capacities can be changed in minutes compared with equivalent physical changes to computing systems that can take weeks.

While Docker is an excellent open-source tool for containerizing software, on its own, Docker tools do not provide the complete solution to deploy applications with complex architectures. This is where integrated container clustering and orchestration services come into their own. Docker orchestration services provide the framework for managing containers over their lifetimes, from creation to decommissioning. A good service should make deployment straightforward, with useful service discovery and efficient networking features.

There is no doubt that working as a DevOps Engineer can be a fascinating and rewarding career, but how do you get started and then stay on track?