1) What is IaC?
Its an acronyms formed from the sentence Infrastructure As Code
2) What is the use of IaC?
Its the concept of defining or provisioning required infrastructure to deploy your developed applications on cloud platform
3) What do you mean "required infrastructure" here?
Let me explain thru an example. You have developed a web application using ReactJS, NodeJS and PostgreSQL database in your local.
Now you want to deploy your code into AWS platform. You want to create an EC2 instance with required security group and configure web server and deploy your code
Here EC2, SG, NGINX (its one of the web server) are required infrastructure for your code
4) Are there implemented tools for IaC ?
As said above IaC is a concept and there any many tools available in market which implements this concept. Some popular tools are heavily used in industries are
1) Terraform (TF)
2) Azure Resource Manager (ARM)
3) Cloud Formation Template (CFT)
4) Google Cloud Deployment Manager (GCDM)
5) Why these many implemented tools ?
Each cloud vendor created their own proprietary IaC tool using that you can define required infrastructure for your application
Example:
If you want to deploy your application into Azure Cloud Platform then you can use ARM
If you want to deploy your application into Amazon Web Service (AWS) then you can use CFT
If you want to deploy your application into Google Cloud Platform (GCP) ) then you can use GCDM
6) Do we have any IaC tool which allows us to define required infrastructure one time and it should be used across any cloud platform ?
Yes, Terraform (TF) by HashiCorp tool allows you define your requirement that can be used across all cloud platform
7) What benefit do we get when you go with neutral IaC tool for all cloud platform?
You can easily transform your infrastructure from one cloud platform to another simply by running the developed TF code in the required cloud platform
Stay tuned...will continue my post and walk you through Terraform tools in details with more practical way :)
