Preface

In continuously evolving environments, operations and development teams are increasingly working together, using tools and techniques and sharing a common culture popularized as part of the DevOps movement. From development to production, a common tooling and approach emerged—often borrowed from developers and the agile techniques.

Now that APIs are everywhere in the datacenter, automation took over every aspect and every step of what used to be a sysadmin or IT job—infrastructure is now basically code, and should be considered as such while working alone in development or in production within a distributed team.

Learning the most important tools, techniques, and workflows that fit in an infrastructure-as-code description can be a daunting task, and many teams can either be misled or discouraged by the amount of information, change, and knowledge required to switch to infrastructure-as-code.

This book has been written keeping in mind all those teams that we have met in the past few years through our respective jobs—teams interested in DevOps, automation, and code, sometimes already doing part of it quite well, but willing to discover other tools and techniques, discovering how they could do better by improving the quality of their code, the stability of their infrastructure, the scalability of their services, the speed of their deployments, the efficiency of team work, and the feedback loop.

This book is a humble attempt to cover everything related to infrastructure-as-code, based on our real-life experience, from development workflows with Vagrant to complex production infrastructure deployments with Terraform or Ansible, from configuration management essentials using Chef and Puppet to advanced Test-Driven Development (TDD) techniques, and thorough infrastructure code coverage testing. It will also give insights and advanced Docker techniques, and much more. Whenever it was possible or relevant, we tried to show alternative ways of doing the same thing with another tool or approach, so that everyone with any prior knowledge of the subject can still find something to learn in any section of the book.

We hope you'll get much out of this book, and that automating and testing using infrastructure-as-code will be as fun for you as it's been for us to write about.