Back in the day when you needed a computer or a technical infrastructure you needed some money and you had to go and purchase actual computer equipment. With the wonders of the cloud technology it is possible to connect to one of the cloud vendors and allocate not only a virtual machine but all of the other networking pieces. From load balancers and fire wall rules to network address translation and actual internet access.
None of this is actually news, Amazon has been providing services since 2006. What is new, or relatively new, is the ability to declare how your IT environment should look and have it implemented on command. It is super cool for software development, you can create a test or development environment in the morning and shut it all down before going home.
Of course Amazon has their own tool for this – cloud formation. If you are planning on choosing AWS this might be the best choice. However, if the goal is to not be locked into one cloud vendor perhaps picking your own external tool is a good idea.
There are essentially two different ways to implement the infrastructure.
Declarative
The declarative approach only requires you define what infrastructure you wish to exist at the end. You can run a declarative solution multiple times. The first time the infastructure will be implemented, while the additional runs will verify what you need already exists. If there are no changes, then nothing new will be implemented.
Imperative
The other approach is a set of steps that when run will create their pieces of the infrastructure. These may need to be run in a specific order. Running these steps multiple times may create multiple sets of infrastructure.
My next blog will be about using Terraform
