Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Apr 4, 2021

AWS Proton - A template-driven service for container and serverless applications that abstracts away from the need to hand craft configuration for infrastructure provisioning, code deployments, monitoring, and updates. 🌐

Amazon OpsWorks - AWS OpsWorks is essentially a managed Chef or Puppet solution. 🌐

Amazon SAM - The Amazon Serverless Application Model (SAM) allows defining complete serverless applications (e.g. DynamoDB tables, APIs, etc.) in a declarative manner. It is an extension to CloudFormation. 🌐

Ansible - Ansible is a OS-level configuration tool that differentiates itself from others by "SSHing" into remote hosts rather than requiring the installation of agents on client machines. For this reason, Ansible is very popular to "boot strap" systems such as Kubernetes clusters. Scripts are written in YAML. 🌐
Chef - Chef is a master-slave (requiring an additional workstation to control the master) configuration management system. Configuration is expressed, arguably, in a more imperative style than other similar solutions. Scripts are written using a Ruby-based DSL. 🌐
CloudFormation - AWS CloudFormation is a solution to orchestrate resources (e.g. scaling) using a declarative approach. In essence, CloudFormation is Amazon's realisation of the Infrastructure as Code paradigm. 🌐

Packer - HashiCorp Packer is a tool for building virtual machine images in pretty much every single format: VMWare, Amazon AMI, etc. 🌐
Pulumi - Pulumi, like Terraform, allows defining infrastructure as code on any cloud but with the advantage of using a general-purpose language (e.g. Python, JavaScript, etc.) rather than a proprietary configuration format. 🌐
Puppet - Puppet is a configuration management solution that uses a client/server model and attempts to describe OS configuration in a declarative basis. Scripts are written in JSON. 🌐
Salt - Salt is a modern contender to the established configuration management solutions. It supports both an agent-less model like Ansible as well as an agent model (agents are called minions). Scripts are written using a Pyhton-based DSL. 🌐
Serverless Framework - The Serverless Framework has the objective of writing Cloud vendor-agnostic serverless applications. To achieve this purpose, it provides a declarative language similar to AWS SAM (which is then translated to the vendor's proprietary declaration scheme), an event gateway, and a dashboard. 🌐
Terraform - HashiCorp Terraform is solution to define interoperable infrastructure as code so that the same scripts can be used across heterogeneous platforms (AWS, VMWare, etc.) 🌐

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