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    Infrastructure-as-Code Automation Using Terraform, Packer, Vault, Nomad and Consul: Hands-on Deployment, Configuration, and Best Practices
    Infrastructure-as-Code Automation Using Terraform, Packer, Vault, Nomad and Consul: Hands-on Deployment, Configuration, and Best Practices
    Infrastructure-as-Code Automation Using Terraform, Packer, Vault, Nomad and Consul: Hands-on Deployment, Configuration, and Best Practices
    Ebook287 pages1 hour

    Infrastructure-as-Code Automation Using Terraform, Packer, Vault, Nomad and Consul: Hands-on Deployment, Configuration, and Best Practices

    By Navin Sabharwal, Sarvesh Pandey and Piyush Pandey

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Discover the methodologies and best practices for getting started with HashiCorp tools, including Terraform, Vault, and Packer. The book begins with an introduction to the infrastructure-as-code concept while establishing the need for automation and management technologies. You’ll go over hands-on deployment, configuration, and best practices for Terraform, Packer, Vault, Nomad, and Consul. You’ll then delve deeper into developing automation code using Terraform for automating AWS/Azure/GCP public cloud tasks; advanced topics include leveraging Vault for secrets management and Packer for image management.

    Along the way you will also look at Nomad and Consul for managing application orchestration along with network interconnectivity. In each chapter you will cover automated infrastructure and application deployment on the VM/container base ecosystem. The book provides sample code and best-practice guidance for developers and architects to look at infrastructure-as-code adoptionfrom a holistic viewpoint.           

    All the code presented in the book is available in the form of scripts, which allow you to try out the examples and extend them in interesting ways. 

    What You Will Learn

    • Get an overview of the architecture of Terraform, Vault, Packer, Nomad, and Consul
    • Follow hands-on steps for enabling Terraform, Vault, Packer, Nomad, and Consul
    • Automate various services on the public cloud, including AWS, Azure, and GCP 

    Who This Book Is For 

    Developers, architects, and administrators who want to learn about infrastructure-as-code automation.



    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherApress
    Release dateAug 23, 2021
    ISBN9781484271292
    Infrastructure-as-Code Automation Using Terraform, Packer, Vault, Nomad and Consul: Hands-on Deployment, Configuration, and Best Practices

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      Book preview

      Infrastructure-as-Code Automation Using Terraform, Packer, Vault, Nomad and Consul - Navin Sabharwal

      © Navin Sabharwal, Sarvesh Pandey and Piyush Pandey 2021

      N. Sabharwal et al.Infrastructure-as-Code Automation Using Terraform, Packer, Vault, Nomad and Consul https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-7129-2_1

      1. Getting Started with HashiCorp Automation Solutions

      Navin Sabharwal¹  , Sarvesh Pandey² and Piyush Pandey³

      (1)

      New Delhi, Delhi, India

      (2)

      Noida, UP, India

      (3)

      New Delhi, India

      This chapter introduces you to infrastructure as code (IaC) and HashiCorp’s automation offerings, helping users adopt the IaC philosophy to manage infrastructure and the application lifecycle. The chapter covers the following topics.

      Introduction to infrastructure as code

      Introduction to HashiCorp’s automation offerings

      Introduction to Infrastructure as Code

      Building infrastructure is an evolving and complex art, which demands repetitive improvements involving aspects such as maintainability, scalability, fault-tolerance, and performance.

      In traditional environment, building and deploying infrastructure components was a manual and tedious task which translates to delays and decreases organizational agility. With the emergence of IaC infra components are now treated as merely a software construct, a code which can be shared across different teams. IaC has given rise to mutable infrastructure as the lifecycle of every infra resource/component is treated via code. This leads to negligible configuration drift across various environments thereby maintaining sanity of the environment. Infrastructure is treated the same way an application is treated in an environment. It follows the same devops principle as application, shares same pipelines and is version controlled.

      Another key benefit that IaC offers is the consistency of the build. If you need to manage several environments (e.g., development, QA, staging, and production), spinning those up from the same codebase ensures that negligible configuration drift is introduced across the environments, ensuring that they all behave the same way.

      IaC encourages declarative style of code wherein the desired end state and the configuration are present before final state is provisioned. Declarative code tends to be more reusable in the environment as current configuration changes are considered while catering for any new request for new infrastructure. 

      Figure 1-1 is a high-level view of how IaC tools operate.

      ../images/492265_1_En_1_Chapter/492265_1_En_1_Fig1_HTML.jpg

      Figure 1-1.

      How infrastructure as code works

      IaC solutions complies with below mentioned principles, as shown in Figure 1-2.

      Version control is a popular concept wherein every release corresponds to a source code build which is maintained as a versioned artifact in the environment. In IaC, a similar principle is applied to manage the infrastructure and changes using version-control commits in the source code repository. This provides traceability of changes made to the infrastructure definition covering who made changes, what has changed, and so forth. This is also crucial when you need to roll back to a previous version of the code while troubleshooting an issue.

      ../images/492265_1_En_1_Chapter/492265_1_En_1_Fig2_HTML.jpg

      Figure 1-2.

      Principles of infrastructure as code

      Predictability refers to IaC capability as a solution to always provide the same environment and associated attributes (as defined in the version-controlled system) every time it is invoked.

      Consistency ensures that multiple instances of the same baseline code provide a similar environment. This avoids inconsistencies and configuration drift when manually building complex infrastructure entities.

      Repeatability refers to a solution that always provides the same results based on the provided input.

      Composability refers to service managed in a modular and abstracted format, which can be used to build complex application systems. This feature empowers users to focus on the target application build rather than worry about the under-the-hood details and complex logic used for provisioning.

      Introduction to HashiCorp Automation

      HashiCorp, founded in 2012 by Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar, is a well known infrastructure automation solution company with the aim of automating hybrid cloud management processes, including application development, delivery, and operations. Over the years, HashiCorp has released a variety of open source and enterprise-supported hybrid cloud automation solutions. Below are the Hashicorp toolsets which are widely available for enterprise solutions–

      Terraform

      Vault

      Packer

      Consul

      Nomad

      Vagrant

      Boundary

      Waypoint

      Now let’s look at how each of these solutions enables hybrid cloud automation.

      Packer

      Image management has been a fundamental prerequisite for virtual or physical system provisioning. Traditional image automation solutions leverages baselines or golden images were manually build and maintained. However, human errors introduced at the image-build stage could lead to configuration drift in the provisioned service. HashiCorp Packer is an open source tool for creating golden images for multiple platforms from single source configuration thereby solving problems with manually created images.

      Packer lets you automate the build of golden images. It works with tools like ansible to install software while creating images. It uses configuration files along with the concepts of builder and provisioners to spin up, configure an instance as a golden image. The configuration code can be changed in case of introduction of a new state element (addition of a new agent) or during updation scenarios (patching, hardening) of golden image and is used to create an updated image without human intervention.

      The following are the key advantages of Packer solutions.

      Accelerated image creation and update process: Packer helps create and update multiple images belonging to multiple clouds or multiple OS types within minutes. You don’t have to wait for the administrator to create/update manually, which can take hours or even days.

      Support for multiple providers: Packer supports multiple providers and platforms, so you can manage identical images across your hybrid cloud environment with the same standardization and consistency level.

      Reduction in human error–induced inconsistencies: Using a codified approach for managing images, you can remove any inconsistencies or configuration drifts in your environment.

      Terraform

      Terraform is an IaC (infrastructure as code) tool that allows users to define a desirable infrastructure definition in a declarative language. Using terraform the infra components within the environment can be deployed and treated as a code in terraform's configuration file that you can version, share and reuse.

      HashiCorp Terraform has its own configuration language called HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language). An HCL file always ends with *.tf. HashiCorp also supports the JSON format for configuration files. It’s the user’s decision on whether to use JSON or HCL to write Terraform code. HCL is widely used because of its simplicity and complex knowledge of target infrastructure technologies.

      HashiCorp Terraform is available in the following three modes.

      Terraform CLI (open source)

      Terraform Cloud

      Terraform Enterprise

      The following are the key benefits of using HashiCorp Terraform.

      Accelerated hybrid cloud service provisioning: Terraform enables accelerated provisioning of services across the hybrid cloud, covering more than 500 technologies.

      State management: Terraform allows tracking services for changes or configuration drifts. This enables governance of service configuration beyond the provisioning phase of the service lifecycle.

      Planning and testing services: Terraform enables the planning and testing of services before the provisioning or modification stages, allowing users to safely and predictably manage the service lifecycle.

      Consistency and reduction in human errors: Using a codified approach to managing the service lifecycle, you can remove any inconsistencies or configuration drifts in your environment.

      Vault

      HashiCorp Vault is leveraged for storing and securely accessing secrets via API keys and password. Secrets are defined as any form of sensitive credentials that need to be controlled; they are used to unlock sensitive information. Secrets can be stored in passwords, API keys, or SSH keys. Vault stores secrets for authentication and authorization.

      Protecting secrets and access for automation is of primary importance. HashiCorp Vault solutions make it easy to manage secrets and access by leveraging the API and a user-friendly interface. You can monitor detailed logs and fetch audit trails on who accessed which secrets and when.

      User authentication is via a password or by using dynamic values to generate temporary tokens that allow access to a particular path. Policies can also be defined using HCL to determine which user gets what level of access.

      Nomad

      HashiCorp Nomad is an easy-to-use workload manager that enables users to schedule tasks and deploy applications in a containerized or non-containerized infrastructure. It allows you to write code and build software using declarative infrastructure as code.

      Consul

      HashiCorp Consul is a multiple–data center service mesh solution that provides the capability to govern application service communication using a control plane. It also offers service discovery and health checks. It leverages a secure TLS protocol to establish mutual TLS connections.

      A service mesh allows you to control communication between different application components or between multiple applications. A service mesh leverages the IaC concept to define a communication policy. It typically uses a network proxy or sidecar concept for governing communication between application services. Data communication patterns help developers optimize service interaction and performance. For example, a service mesh can monitor the amount of time it takes to reconnect to access the application service during unavailability. This can help developers redefine the waiting period before an application service tries to reconnect.

      Vagrant

      One of the fundamental challenges developers face is the consistency of the development environment used for writing code. Multiple solutions are available on the market, including VirtualBox, VMware Workstation, and Docker. Hypervisor platforms like VMware, KVM, and Hyper-V are typically used for setting up developer workstations; however, manual administration makes it tedious to manage configuration requirements for each application team which results in no consistency between different environments and introduces configuration drift due to manual intervention.

      HashiCorp Vagrant enables you to build and manage a developer’s environment using a workflow-driven approach that leverages the power of infrastructure as a code. Using its integrations with various platform technologies, the developer environment is configured using a consistent, repeatable, and accelerated approach. From a developer’s

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