Everything As Code (EaC) What It Is and Why It's Gaining Popularity?

Digital transformation, cloud-native, open source, DevOps, and other transformative technologies have disrupted the lives of software developers, DevOps engineers, cybersecurity professionals, Platform engineers and others have also had a major impact on IT generalists and how they work. Everything as Code aims to tackle the issues surrounding this new technology paradigm to help generalists and others in the IT community flourish.

Complex systems are becoming more and more important to most enterprises. Everything can't be handled by one server or a component. Legislation, globalisation, and shared hardware are issues we must contend with. For provisioning, upgrading, monitoring, securing, and decommissioning thousands of computing endpoints like virtual machines, containers, and other computing devices, manual processes are no longer practical.

Due to the recent hybrid workplace culture, businesses have had to adapt their operational strategies because of the distributed nature of their workforces. As a result, there has never been a greater need to get rid of manual and repetitive tasks. Fortunately, you can approach managing the infrastructure programmatically in the same manner that you approach writing code to create software by using the everything-as-code practices.

An "Everything as Code (EaC)" strategy approaches infrastructure (Infrastructure-as-code), security (Security-as-code), configuration management (Config-as-code), and compliance (Governance-as-code), DevOps (CI/CD Pipelines-as-Code), just like application code, depicts a world in which our infrastructures, processes, and services begin to exhibit the sophisticated, programmed, and robust workflows we are accustomed to.

Types of Everything as Code

There are various types of tools that enables an Everything as Code strategy that IT teams can choose from:

• Provisioning Tools: The infrastructure on the cloud is created with the help of provisioning tools. These tools enable developers to specify precise infrastructure elements. Terraform, Pulumi, AWS CloudFormation, Azure ARM templates, Cross plane and OpenStack Heat are some examples of this.
• Scripting Tools: The simplest way to learn Everything as Code is to write scripts that are idempotent in nature which means no matter how many times these scripts are executed, you will achieve the same results. For quick, one-off, or straightforward jobs, ad-hoc scripts work well. However, it's preferable to utilise a more specialist alternative for intricate setups.
• Containers and templating tools: These tools generate templates or images pre-loaded with all the libraries and components required to run an application. Containerized workloads are easy to distribute and have much lower overhead than running a full-size server. Examples are Docker, Vagrant, and Packer.
• Configuration management tools: Also known as configuration-as-code, these are specialized tools designed to manage software. They usually focus on installing and configuring servers. Examples of these tools are Chef, Puppet, and Ansible.
• Security policy management tools: Policy management tools helps to manage the security, access, and governance-as-code. Some of the examples are Open Policy Agent, Azure Policies, and GCP policies.
• DevOps and CI/CD management tools: The approach of defining deployment pipelines through source code, such as Git, is known as "pipeline-as-code". Some of examples are Gitlab, Harness, and Azure DevOps.
• Custom Tools: Teams with high levels of DevOps maturity sometimes build custom tools or abstraction layers to implement their everything as code strategy to have better control over the processes which enables them to implement security control in these layers. This also enables them to abstract the producer models from the consumer and allows them to change the underlying tools while maintaining the same consumption model with their consumers.

Benefits of Everything as Code

Automated and Repeatable

Imagine being in a Disaster Recovery situation or simply duplicating IT resources geographically to setup new sites, it is so much faster and safer to run a script to set up everything from scratch compared to having to manually configure all the components and go through endless documentations of standard operating procedures. In some situations where you are recovering from a partial component failure, using declarative infrastructure configuration tools which basically describes how your target state “should be”, you can simply run your script and the tool would take care of making the necessary changes to bridge any gaps from that target state. You don’t even have to start from scratch which makes things a lot faster.

Makes the jobs of platform engineers and software developers more productive

Everything as code enhances uniformity between IT systems and processes while lowering the possibility of human mistake and lesser dependencies on the resources. When everything is written in code and integrated into your company's software lifecycle, stakeholders are already familiar with a single language and set of procedures. That shared comprehension promotes cross-team cooperation, which is essential to DevOps.

Testing is easier

The intricacy of any critical system might make individuals uneasy about making changes. Teams can create tests for their infrastructure using everything as code to validate its accuracy. They can encrypt policies to ensure compliance with all deployed infrastructure and its configurations. Infrastructure components can be shared between teams as reusable, best practice-capturing bits of code once they have undergone testing. Stop trying to reinvent the wheel.

Stable and scalable environments

EaC delivers stable environments rapidly and at scale. Teams avoid manual configuration of environments and enforce consistency by representing the desired state of their environments via code. Deployments with EaC are repeatable and prevent runtime issues caused by configuration drift or missing dependencies. DevOps teams can work together with a unified set of practices and tools to deliver applications and their supporting IT infrastructure rapidly, reliably, and at scale.

Ownership and Documentation

EaC not only streamlines the procedure but also acts as a record of how to allocate resources and provide insurance if an employee leaves your business with institutional knowledge. EaC enables every change to your resource configuration to be recorded, logged, traced, and tracked because code may be version-controlled. And just like code, these configurations can be tested.

Conclusion:

Everything as a Code refers to keeping every area of IT automated while preserving agility. By gaining visibility into your prior successes and errors, you are elevating your approach. It is a novel method for managing infrastructure, applications, security, configuration, and software that allows teams to operate at cloud speed while retaining the highest levels of effectiveness, security, and best practises. There is no one size fits all approach to Everything as Code. It is vital for the organisation to consider their needs, capabilities, and budget to adopt an efficient Everything as Code strategy that will aim at the standardisation of the daily IT workflows, lower the costs, and increase productivity, rather than introduce complexities that will eventually increase waste and technical debt.