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Published Oct 20, 2021

Episode 482: Luke Hoban on Infrastructure as Code

Dive into the world of Infrastructure as Code with Luke Hoban, as he uncovers strategies for integrating continuous delivery, managing cloud complexity, and enhancing security in automated deployments, emphasizing the need for advanced tools and software-driven automation to streamline modern cloud infrastructure.
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  • Complexity

    emphasizes the growing complexity in managing cloud infrastructure, highlighting the need for sophisticated tools like Pulumi. He explains that managing thousands of cloud resources daily is a software problem, not just an infrastructure issue, necessitating advanced software solutions 1. adds that complexity is merely shifted, not eliminated, drawing parallels to Larry Tesler's law of conservation of complexity 1.

    The great thing also is this complexity isn't coming out of nowhere. In a sense, it's coming because folks are getting more and more value out of the cloud.

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    Hoban further distinguishes between tools that treat infrastructure as data and those that use programming languages, noting that Pulumi allows developers to manage infrastructure using familiar languages like TypeScript and Python 2.

       

    Testing

    Infrastructure as Code (IAC) plays a crucial role in testing cloud environments to ensure reliability. discusses the importance of integration testing, which involves creating production-like environments to test both application and infrastructure changes together 3. This approach provides confidence that deployments will function correctly in real-world scenarios.

    When I open up that PR, I can run this battery of tests to validate that the application and the infrastructure work correctly.

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    Hoban also highlights the significance of unit testing infrastructure to validate its desired state without deployment, using policy tools to ensure compliance during deployment processes 4.

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