Move to Infrastructure as Code

Move to Infrastructure-as-Code in a clean way

Building and managing cloud infrastructure is a crucial part for any company, and nowadays, there are multiple factors making it more and more complex:

• The growing number of services, tools, integrations, configuration parameters
• Lack of skilled engineers
• Increased security risks
• Uncontrolled costs
• How to satisfy the business needs and take time to build things in the right way.

For all these reasons, the industry tried to find solutions starting by automation and now IaC (Infrastructure as Code), dominated by Terraform, that became the defacto standard to build & mange cloud infrastructures

However, transitioning to IaC is not an easy task. It comes with its own challenges and questions depending on the stage of the company and the skill level of engineers:

• How to manage the greenfield (existing infrastructure)?
• Do you manually write all the Terraform code of your existing infrastructure, or you just start with the new one and keep managing the old environments using the cloud providers’ portal?
• Learning curve of the team: Anyone starting the journey has to learn multiple things all at once:
• Terraform
• CI/CD
• Best practices for both Terraform & IaC
• Different tools used for security, compliance, cost optimization…
•  The biggest question here is: Do you hire new engineers who are expert on IaC or train your existing team?  
• How to manage the cultural change / process it will bring and how to onboard teams from different backgrounds

These challenges are also the questions to ask before you start the process, otherwise you’ll be wasting time and money.