In 2024, developers should primarily focus on their core tasks of feature development, fixing bugs and making improvements to the application.
That means less time spent on adding feature flags, managing infrastructure, monitoring deployments, etc.
Also, as per Puppet State of DevOps Report 2023, lack of automation has been one of the biggest pain points of platform teams.
So in this article, letβs unpack why your project needs infrastructure automation and share tools to help you get started.
Shall we?
Developers π
If you are looking to make high impact Open Source contributions in 2024, we have a step-by-step roadmap and an awesome community to help you with that.
Table of Contents
- How Can Your Project Benefit From Infrastructure Automation?
- Tool #1: Digger
- Tool #2: Argo Project
- Tool #3: Pulumi
- Wrap Up
How Can Your Project Benefit From Infrastructure Automation?
Letβs go over some of the basic benefits of automating your infrastructure:
- Ensure repeatable results every time. So that you can provide predictable and reliable experience to users and development teams.
- Remove the need for (#clickops), engineers clicking around in a cloud provider UI. Automation improves process efficiency and agility by reducing manual effort. As a result, freeing up DevOps engineers from the tedious tasks.
- Built in auditing. Keep a log of every operation done in your infrastructure. Comprehensive audit trails provide visibility into history of operations which is of great help at the time of debugging and troubleshooting.
Tool #1: Digger
If you want to simplify your infrastructure management and improve visibility and auditability of its changes, Digger might be worth exploring. Itβs an open-source IaC automation and collaboration software for Terraform and OpenTofu.
You can version control your infrastructure through defining it in code and storing it in the git repository. With automated infra provisioning and updates, Digger ensures consistency and significantly reduces manual effort of DevOps teams.
At the time of writing this article, Digger has ~2.5k stars on GitHub and is used by companies like Grab, McKinsey & Company, Duolingo with several others.
They also have a highly responsive community that will help you with roadblocks along the way.
Tool #2: Argo Project
Argo Project has become one of the top projects to manage Kubernetes clusters and workflows. Along with being able to run CI/CD pipelines natively, you can easily run compute intensive jobs like data processing in fraction of time.
With itβs rollouts tool, it provides advanced deployment capabilities such as:
- Blue-green β
- Canary β
- Canary analysis β
- Experimentation β
Also, Argo provides a declarative approach to application deployment that simplifies the deployment process and reduces the risk of errors.
If youβre thinking, can Argo meet your advanced deployment requirements? Hereβs a step-by-step tutorial by @pavanbelagatti on how to implement advanced deployment strategies:
Argo Rollouts: Unleashing Advanced Deployment Strategies
Pavan Belagatti γ» Aug 2 '23
Tool #3: Pulumi
Storing infrastructure as code is great but how to write code for one? Well Pulumi has solved that for you. It simplifies and automates your cloud infrastructure and optimizes for speed of releases.
Best part? You can do that in your familiar programming language with autocomplete, type checking and up-to-date documentation. Leaving no reason to procrastinate π
Hereβs what Matt Stephenson, Senior Principal Software Engineer at Starburst Analytics has to say about Pulumi:
Pulumi let us build and automate cloud infrastructure projects at a scale that simply wasnβt imaginable using prior-generation infrastructure as code technologies
Pulumi is truly your partner for scaling cloud infrastructure.
Wrap Up
Thatβs it!
Now, I hope these tools will help you in automating your project infrastructure.
If you need any help in setting up these tools, feel free to ping me on discord. We have an awesome community there π
If you found this valuable, follow me for more open source related articles π
Top comments (4)
I love that Pulumi went with the SDK approach, although Terraform also introduced it soon enough. What's your preference DSL, or the SDK?
Same! I always prefer native code over learning a DSL whenever possible
Super cool write up. Thanks for mentioning Digger @markphelps!
Noice!! Really enjoyable read :)
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