Automation using IaC and PaC
Managing large cloud environments requires a change in mindset. Manual deployment is prone to human mistakes and drifts (deviation) from configuration standards and is hard to maintain in the long run since it does not scale. The idea behind IaC is to switch from a manual to an automated way to deploy or make changes to resources in the cloud environment using code.
PaC complements IaC and allows organizations to enforce standards (such as disabling the creation of public resources, allowing only specific VM types, etc.).
IaC
IaC helps bridge multiple organizations within a cloud service provider or even multiple cloud service providers. There are two ways to automate repetitive tasks:
- Declarative: Define what the desired state is (for example, object storage must be encrypted at rest), and the IaC makes the required changes (while understanding the order to make each change)
- Imperative: Define how the infrastructure needs to be changed...
