Infrastructure as Code on AWS

IaC is a method of managing and provisioning IT infrastructure through machine-readable definition files or scripts, rather than traditional interactive configuration tools. This type of management is contrasted with managing resources using AWS’s web console for instance. While the web console can be useful when getting started and for small projects, it will quickly become unwieldy for projects which need to rapidly scale, maintain certain guarantees of consistency, or track configuration and infrastructure state and changes over time.

AWS provides AWS CloudFormation as its native IaC service. There's also AWS CDK (Cloud Development Kit) which allows you to define cloud resources using familiar programming languages. We also commonly work with Terraform, from HashiCorp, for developing IaC templates. A particular templating language or style is less important than the choice to institute IaC itself, but we can help you select between these approaches if you are debating several.

IaC can enhance security by standardizing configurations and ensuring every resource is provisioned with security best practices. It’s worth noting, though, that IaC itself doesn’t automatically confer more security—a badly configured resource will be vulnerable even if it can be deployed quickly and consistently with IaC. While IaC creates repeatability, consistency, and auditability, which are critical dimensions of security, IaC templates need to be well-written and designed with these best practices in mind to yield their full security benefits and should be well integrated with your overall security strategy.

IaC in general will make you more operationally efficient, which can lead to greater environmental efficiency and improve your team’s speed and efficiency. And in the case where you need to quickly scale in or out, IaC is a great opportunity to efficiently launch and turn off resources on an as-needed basis, which can yield major cost savings. So IaC is not purely about time savings or overhead and can materially impact your AWS bill as well.

If you’re considering an Infrastructure as Code approach, there are a couple performance factors to consider which should move you toward adoption. If you are operating a large-scale application, or one that frequently needs to change to accommodate temporary resources, an IaC approach can be a major asset. If you have compliance benchmarks to meet, IaC can offer major advantages in terms of generating documentation and auditability. If high availability or disaster recovery are priorities, IaC will offer fundamental improvements to both and is one of the most common approaches we recommend when trying to achieve specific targets there.