In a world of cloud-native infrastructure, the concept of a single source of truth has become more important when it comes to infrastructure. Especially with the rise of multi-cloud, a single source of truth ensures that bug fixes and new features are developed, tested, and deployed using the same infrastructure and producing the same results.
Clare Liguori likened containers and Infrastructure-as-Code to peanut butter and jelly: good on their own, but better together. Liguori writes on the AWS blog, that containers and Infrastructure-as-Code complement one another for two main reasons:
Sharing and releasing containerized applications
Implementing repeatable and predictable infrastructure changes across different stages
Today, we’re going to talk about how containers and Infrastructure-as-Code provides a single-source of truth for your infrastructure.
Containers capture all the components of an application, including dependencies, regardless of native language, so that they become compatible with commonly used tools and services in the industry.
One way to optimize containers as the single source of truth is by versioning them. According to The Software Development Times, versioning your container can include:
Keeping track of scripts that define Kubernetes pods or clusters.
Tracking history and updates. “Knowing where a service is, who is calling it, as well as the version and relationships is critical.”
(The Software Development Times)
Infrastructure-as-Code is the codification and documentation of your infrastructure. Adopting Infrastructure-as-code helps bridge the gap between development, operations, and security by providing everyone with a clear definition of the state of infrastructure. This definition becomes the single source of truth for the configuration of everything up to the point of the code base itself, so that you can spin up your application regardless of host or environment.
Together, containers and Infrastructure-as-Code define the complete set of rules needed to update, test, and run an application.
Do you want to codify and containerize your applications? Tell us about your infrastructure.