Azure Infrastructure as Code

Henry Been is an independent architect and developer from The Netherlands. He enjoys working with software development teams to create and deliver great software. His interests include the Azure cloud, Agile, DevOps, software architecture, and testable and maintainable software design and implementation. Besides his work, he is a conference speaker at international conferences. For his work in the community, he has been awarded the Microsoft MVP Award.

Henry’s take on Infrastructure as a Code

Henry has been doing this for about eight years in four or five companies. He says the take is straightforward; by adopting Infrastructure as code, we can cut off a lot of manual errors and overheads. I think infrastructures code is the only way we should create and deploy Infrastructure into our production environments. Computers are very good at doing the same thing repeatedly, without mistakes. We humans are not; if you ask ten people to do the same thing from instructions, they will probably do it in eight different ways.”

When and where to use Infrastructure as a code?

You can apply Infrastructure as a code to any environment you deploy. Just as we have done, managing the configuration inside VMs, nothing is holding you back from building a system on-prem that you can manage using Infrastructure as a code. Infrastructure as code is a way to enable customers to quickly spin up the resources required without having to go into their environment to do it for them.

Organizing Infrastructure as the code along with the pipelines as a code

There are different ways you can do it. Some people think it’s wise to organize all the infrastructure code into a single repository and have pipelines connected to it to deploy it. Then they have different pipelines connected to the code or code repositories to deploy the code to that Infrastructure. One good way is to split the application into different distinct components, where the definition of a component is the thing that should be deployed separately. Then all the things related to that one component go into a single repository. Ideally, you want just a single pipeline from that repository to deploy things into the different environments.

Henry Been – The Author

Besides work, Henry has authored two books. His first book is “Implementing Azure DevOps Solutions,” and the recent one is “Azure Infrastructure as a Code.” Henry’s recent book Azure Infrastructure as a Code teaches you how to leverage the platform’s native infrastructure-as-code (IaC) technologies like ARM and Bicep. You’ll learn about deployment stacks, ARM templates, and the potent new language Bicep. See how simple it is to build new environments, alter Infrastructure securely, control your resources using Azure Policy, and avoid configuration drift. This practical reference is a must-read for anyone wishing to further their understanding of provisioning because it is jam-packed with comprehensive syntactic coverage and numerous illustrative examples.