Infrastructure as code (IaC) has become ubiquitous for DevOps teams looking to accelerate how they provision and manage cloud resources on a day-to-day basis.
At scale, however, IaC resources themselves can become difficult to use, maintain, and control. As the complexity of your IaC continues to grow, velocity will grind to a halt while security risks and cloud costs grow out of control.
In this article, we’ll discuss key Infrastructure as Code best practices for DevOps teams looking to improve efficiency at scale.
1. Automate how you create Infrastructure as Code files
Creating IaC modules to define valuable resource configurations can slow down DevOps teams and exacerbate bottlenecks that disrupt entire software development pipelines.
Modern DevOps teams automate the creation of IaC files defining the resource configurations directly from their cloud accounts. By discovering the services deployed via the public cloud, DevOps teams can leverage the resource configurations to automate the creation of new IaC files.
This makes it easier to add new assets to repositories, while reducing the time spent on manual configurations.
2. Ensure Infrastructure as Code resources are easy to find and run
Limiting IaC access to just DevOps and infrastructure teams—a common practice for teams lacking expertise in IaC—limits development velocity.
Developers are often forced to wait for a DevOps engineer or other skilled IaC expert access to the resources they need.
To avoid these bottlenecks, try to make IaC accessible to all team members. By simplifying and governing the provisioning experience for Infrastructure as Code, developers can stay focused on building new features without having to submit tickets to the DevOps team each time they need to run infrastructure.
Moreover, IaC needs to be easy to run. Once they’ve got access, devs shouldn’t have to set complex parameters or supply security credentials to spin up new infrastructure. A dedicated self-service portal lets developers find and deploy IaC configs in just a few clicks.
3. Provide clear visibility into active and inactive environments
Traditional IaC tools lack visibility into what’s running in each environment and who provisioned it, making it difficult to identify and reconcile any errors. It can be difficult to tell why an environment was created, whether it’s still needed, or if configuration drift has occurred.
IaC tools that provide a centralized view of all environments let infrastructure operators take action and make more informed decisions by enabling collaboration with the engineer who provisioned these resources.
Look for solutions that can visualize every environment alongside crucial metadata like the developer who created it, the last deployment time, and any errors. You can then efficiently debug problems, fix misconfigured resources, and remove redundant environments to cut cloud costs.
4. Enable discoverability of which environments use specific Infrastructure as Code resources
DevOps teams must frequently push updates to infrastructure code to apply critical security fixes or important performance improvements. However, these updates can cause unexpected downstream impacts on environments relying on that infrastructure. This not only disrupts work in those environments but also results in time-consuming debugging to correct the issues.
DevOps teams must therefore have clear visibility into the environments that will be affected by individual IaC updates. This makes it easier to collaborate with the teams using that environment and prepare for any issues proactively.
5. Use AI to accelerate complex tasks like environment orchestration
IaC handles infrastructure provisioning tasks, but complex environments typically require orchestration. DevOps teams often struggle to orchestrate infrastructure assets across multiple IaC config modules, especially when those modules are defined via disparate IaC tools.
Generative AI tools can address this challenge, making complex environment creation easier and more efficient. AI lets developers simply describe what their new environment should look like—without having to understand how the infrastructure components need to be connected.
The AI then combines the available IaC components to produce a functioning environment config.
This is just one example where generative AI can help to offload manual work that slows down the DevOps teams responsible for managing Infrastructure as Code.
6. Automate Day-2 actions for your infrastructure and environments
Infrastructure management doesn’t end when resources are deployed.
Routine Day-2 actions—or tasks that need to be performed on live infrastructure, such as managing scaling, collecting monitoring data, and creating backups—take up additional bandwidth that could be used on more strategic efforts.
Automating day-2 actions allows you to manage these tasks in the same way as your infrastructure resources. Defining actions as code that runs on-demand or in response to a trigger makes it easier to implement day-2 requirements across all environments.
7. Scan Infrastructure as Code for misconfigurations before you deploy
Misconfigured IaC code frequently causes errors, security issues, and compliance breaches, and failure to address misconfigurations at an early stage can quickly cause costly incidents. So it’s vital to implement safeguards that prevent resources being deployed in an unsafe state.
Scanning your code using tools like Checkov and TFLint can reveal problems before you deploy, preventing them from affecting live environments.
Furthermore, many DevOps teams could benefit from IaC tools that help to maintain effective governance by enforcing security, compliance, and cost management policies. Using policies to enforce specific config rules—such as preventing S3 buckets from being configured for public access—promotes strong governance and prevents errors.
8. Continually track IaC usage, performance, and costs
Engineering and technology leadership often struggle to understand the impact that IaC has on development productivity. It’s challenging to tell whether IaC is improving productivity and contributing to operational efficiency improvements, or if IaC mismanagement is leading to cloud waste and cost overruns.
Implementing monitoring processes around your IaC tools makes it possible to quantify the impact of IaC, such as by tracking the number of infrastructure changes made in a given time vs. the incidents that occurred.
Measuring IaC activity also enables continuous improvement over time. Make sure to proactively analyze usage stats to see which teams and projects are using IaC the most successfully. Similarly, regularly assessing the resource utilization of your environments can reveal opportunities to boost performance and cost efficiency.
9. Use Infrastructure as Code to manage all resources and environments
IaC has the biggest impact on your workflows when it’s the only way to provision infrastructure. Including all infrastructure components and environments within the scope of your IaC system gives developers the flexibility to create any resource when they need it.
Going all-in on IaC also ensures your assets are fully reproducible. They’ll always be created using a single, consistent process defined in your infrastructure code. By leveraging IaC within a centralized platform, you can ensure everyone’s working the same way.
10. Be mindful of Infrastructure as Code security issues
IaC makes infrastructure management easier and more consistent, but it can also produce security risks. Exposing infrastructure access to more developers broadens your attack surface, while shared modules and templates mean a bug in one resource could affect hundreds or thousands of live infrastructure components.
To mitigate these risks, IaC configs and the infrastructure assets they create must be robustly secured using defense-in-depth principles. Create centralized authentication and RBAC, following the principle of least privilege, to be certain users are only assigned the minimum infrastructure access they require.
It’s also critical to scan all IaC modules for misconfigurations regularly so you can efficiently find and fix issues that could affect the security of your environments.
11. Detect and correct configuration drift in live environments
Configuration drift is a major cause of IaC issues. Drift occurs when live resources differ from their IaC config. It’s often caused by manual infrastructure changes, flaky external integrations, and unwanted automatic updates. Drift can lead to breaches, compliance violations, and other security incidents because your infrastructure no longer matches the configuration you set.
Gaining visibility into drift as it happens means you can address the issue proactively—thereby mitigating the risk of downtime, bugs, or security vulnerabilities.
Look for IaC solutions that automate drift detection and reconciliation by periodically comparing the state of your live infrastructure to the IaC config files in your repository. This minimizes how long drift can last and enables timely investigation of the events that triggered the drift.
12. Keep Infrastructure as Code simple, modular, and reusable
Developers can struggle to create new infrastructure configs because they lack specialist IaC skills. They often end up waiting for DevOps teams to prepare new environments, adding friction to development cycles.
DevOps teams can make a few small adjustments to solve this problem.
Automating the creation of IaC files not only accelerates this process, but can also further democratize this ability by eliminating the need for skills in writing infrastructure code. If developers or engineers can simply codify the resources deployed via their cloud accounts, they can generate new IaC files which can be reused.
Normalization is also valuable for this process. Developers can easily compose complex environments from modular building blocks provided by infrastructure teams. Creating an inventory of normalized IaC modules is a powerful way to give devs more autonomy while, still allowing DevOps to control the components developers use.
How Quali Torque helps you implement IaC best practices
Quali Torque is a developer platform for creating, deploying, and managing IaC and environments at scale. It supports AI prompt-powered environment configuration, self-service developer access, and day-2 action workflows to keep your infrastructure running smoothly.
Quali Torque gives you a single cohesive platform to manage drift, enforce governance policies, and gain clear visibility into performance, usage, and costs. Torque also makes it easy to find and access provisioned environments, including the users who are responsible for them. This keeps everyone informed of what’s running and why it’s required.