5 Best Infrastructure as Code Tools for 2023 and beyond
In the modern world, the world of DevOps and cloud computing, infrastructure as code (IAC) has become something of a buzzword. As we move into a new decade, however, it’s clear that this isn’t just hype or trendy jargon — it’s simply how we’re building our systems in today’s world. In fact, almost every major tech company uses IAC in some way or another.
The need for infrastructure as code tools
In the past decade, the world has advanced at an exponential rate. The technology and computing industry is one of the most rapidly changing industries in the world. This means that companies that are not able to keep up with these changes will find it difficult to sustain their businesses in this competitive environment.
For this reason, organizations should always look for ways of making their software development processes more efficient and effective so that they can remain ahead of their competitors in terms of efficiency. One way to achieve this goal is by adopting new technologies like infrastructure as code tools, which help automate infrastructure deployment and management processes.
Best Infrastructure as Code Tools for 2023:
1. Terraform
Terraform is a tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently. Terraform can deploy to any provider that supports HashiCorp’s Terraform provider API.
Unlike existing tools in this area, Terraform was built from the ground up to provide a very simple but powerful system for managing changes to infrastructure over time. It has an expressive configuration syntax, which enables automatic generation of complete plans for large-scale changes (with minimal required human intervention). These features make it an ideal choice for infrastructure as code.
2. Pulumi
Pulumi is an open source cloud development tool that helps developers build and deploy modern cloud native applications. So you can use a declarative programming language (the same one used by Kubernetes) to describe your application’s infrastructure: how many instances of a function should be running on AWS, how much memory does each instance need, etc.
Pulumi works with any framework or runtime that supports Kubernetes deployments, like AWS Lambda functions or Google App Engine apps.
3. Ansible
Ansible is an open source tool for automating configuration, deployment, and management of IT infrastructure. It manages nodes over SSH or WinRM and requires no additional remote software to be installed on them. Ansible uses YAML to write playbooks, which are idempotent descriptions of a series of steps that can be applied in any order as often as needed to bring a target system into the desired state. Playbooks may be written in any language supported by ANSIBLE_PLUGINS_PATH.
Ansible is written in Python and uses YAML to write playbooks.
4. CloudFormation
CloudFormation is a service that lets you provision and manage a collection of related AWS resources. It’s an infrastructure as code tool that uses the declarative language Apache YAML, making it easier to create and deploy stacks.
CloudFormation helps you with:
- Deploy complex applications on AWS by reducing the number of steps required to launch or update your application in the cloud.
- Manage your infrastructure easily by creating templates for every resource in your AWS account, including security groups, VPC configurations, S3 buckets, Lambda functions, and more; then apply those templates at any time to create or update resources across all regions, with no downtime in between reboots when needed! This makes it ideal if you want something like blueprints within your own private environment where they can be shared amongst multiple users who would otherwise need access to one another’s credentials but don’t necessarily trust each other enough yet.
5. Chef
Chef is an open-source automation platform that runs on your servers, enabling you to configure them automatically. It can also run software on remote servers. Chef has been around since 2009, and it’s written in Ruby. The tool itself is free and open source, but you’ll need to pay for support if you want to use it with more than one server or add features like continuous integration or deployment capabilities.
Chef’s main purpose is configuration management—that is, managing the state of your infrastructure so that all of the services running on it are configured consistently across machines and teams. You can use Chef for tasks such as automating the installation and configuration of software packages across multiple servers (e.g., installing Apache along with any required modules).
6. Puppet
Puppet is a configuration management tool that automates the deployment and configuration of software on multiple machines. Puppet can automate tasks such as installing packages, starting and stopping services, configuring users and groups, and adding users to groups.
Puppet consists of two major components: an agent that runs on each node (the managed system) in your environment; and a reporting server that stores data about those nodes. The agent performs the actual work of applying configurations to your systems; it has its own language for writing these configurations, called Puppet Language (PL).
7. SaltStack
SaltStack is a configuration management and remote execution tool. It’s a Python-based software platform that streamlines cloud provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment.
SaltStack is an open source tool for building and managing infrastructure or IT environments. It allows you to create a centralized system of command and control using SaltStack servers that manage the whole environment from one location. You can use SaltStack as an alternative to other tools such as Ansible or Puppet because it has support for multiple operating systems, including Windows along with Linux flavors like Arch Linux and CentOS.
The primary benefit of Salt is its ability to allow you to use your existing infrastructure instead of having to build new virtual machines every time you need something new; this saves time while also ensuring consistency across all systems in your organization (or even multiple organizations).
Conclusion
I think we can all agree that Infrastructure as Code (IAC) is a difficult concept to grasp. With so many tools available, it can be hard to know where to start or which tool will work best for your organization. It’s important for organizations to understand their requirements and choose the right tool for their needs—that way they can focus on creating great products without worrying about whether or not their servers are up and running!