Harness Infrastructure as Code Management (IaCM) Overview

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the ability to define resources as code definitions. It allows for repeatable infrastructure configuration. Examples of IaC tools are HashiCorp Terraform and Amazon CloudFormation.

Harness Infrastructure as Code Management (IaCM) provides a way to avoid the following common issues:

• Manual processes: Infrastructure provisioning and change processes are often manual. A request for new infrastructure or an update can take days or even weeks to be fulfilled by a dedicated team that owns the IaC processes. This leads to development and deployment delays.

• Basic/poor governance: Security and best practices are poorly governed across the infrastructure. Without central policy definition and enforcement, teams are left to manually review infrastructure plans and monitor infrastructure for issues. This can lead to security vulnerabilities, lack of consistency/compliance, and unexpected or untethered costs.

• Limited visibility: Lack of centralized visibility into infrastructure state, health, usage, cost, and dependencies.

• Manual rollbacks: When issues occur due to infrastructure changes, rolling back to a stable state is manual. This introduces delays and downtime and can be error-prone.

• Organizational complexity and scale: As infrastructure scales, it requires more teams to maintain it. For effective collaboration, it's essential to delegate ownership of infrastructure across these teams and empower them to work in parallel without conflict. Also, allow them to determine their tools and processes while ensuring compliance.

• Lack of collaboration: Users and small teams face challenges when it comes to collaboration on shared resources and may end up with conflicts when it comes to resource changes.