Infrastructure as Code: Dynamic Systems for the Cloud Age

Six years ago, Infrastructure as Code was a new concept. Today, as even banks and other conservative organizations plan moves to the cloud, development teams for companies worldwide are attempting to build large infrastructure codebases. With this practical book, Kief Morris of ThoughtWorks shows you how to effectively use principles, practices, and patterns pioneered by DevOps teams to manage cloud-age infrastructure.

Ideal for system administrators, infrastructure engineers, software developers, team leads, and architects, this updated edition demonstrates how you can exploit cloud and automation technology to make changes easily, safely, quickly, and responsibly. You’ll learn how to define everything as code and apply software design and engineering practices to build your system from small, loosely coupled pieces.

This book covers:

• Foundations: Use Infrastructure as Code to drive continuous change and raise the bar of operational quality, using tools and technologies to build cloud-based platforms
• Working with infrastructure stacks: Learn how to define, provision, test, and continuously deliver changes to infrastructure resources
• Working with servers and other platforms: Use patterns to design provisioning and configuration of servers and clusters
• Working with large systems and teams: Learn workflows, governance, and architectural patterns to create and manage infrastructure elements

Kief Morris has been designing, building, and running automated IT server infrastructure for nearly twenty years, having started out with shell scripts and Perl, moving on to CFengine, Puppet, Chef, and Ansible among other technologies as they’ve emerged. He is the head of ThoughtWorks’ European practice for Continuous Delivery and DevOps, helping clients find more effective ways of building and managing infrastructure operations.