Alexis Kestler
Infrastructure automation is becoming a mandatory capability for IT teams looking to improve agility and efficiency. The days of manual configuration and deployment are not sustainable as infrastructure complexity continues to grow. Adopting infrastructure-as-code principles enabled by automation tools provides major benefits but can seem daunting to implement.
This comprehensive guide aims to make it easier to understand infrastructure automation and evaluate solutions tailored to mid-size and enterprise needs.
As someone managing infrastructure, you are likely all too familiar with the pains of manual processes – inconsistent configurations, frustrations around dependency management, rushed releases full of human errors, days spent firefighting production issues. Modern infrastructure demands modern approaches.
The benefits of adopting infrastructure automation include:
- Faster application deployment velocities
- Reduction in human errors that cause outages
- Consistent and repeatable environment configurations
- Streamlined and collaborative workflows
- Increased focus on innovation vs manual maintenance
- Improved compliance and governance
- Enhanced productivity and job satisfaction
Research shows that companies accelerate deployment frequencies by up to 2300% and recover from failures 96% faster after adopting DevOps practices enabled by infrastructure automation. The numbers don‘t lie – automation pays dividends.
This guide will arm you with an overview of leading infrastructure automation solutions so you can make an informed decision on where to start or what to add to your stack. Let‘s examine the core capabilities that these tools provide before diving into the top options.
Core Capabilities of Infrastructure Automation Tools
Solutions in this space aim to make managing IT infrastructure predictable, consistent, and programmable. Here are the primary capabilities to evaluate when considering automation tools:
Configuration Management – Automatically installing and managing systems and infrastructure code, configurations, and policies.
Provisioning – Enabling infrastructure resources like servers, containers, networks to be spun up on-demand.
Orchestration – Coordinating and integrating tasks, tools, and workflows to deliver applications.
Deployment – Pushing new code revisions and updates to existing infrastructure and applications.
Monitoring – Collecting metrics on performance, availability and utilization of infrastructure.
Governance – Ensuring compliance with organizational standards and regulations when managing infrastructure.
Leading solutions provide some mix of these capabilities. Let‘s dive into the top options across both open source and commercial tools.
Ansible
Ansible is one of the most popular infrastructure automation tools due to its agentless architecture, simplicity, and broad capabilities. As an open source tool originally developed by Red Hat, it benefits from strong community support and integration with other open source projects.
The YAML-based declarative language used to define playbooks is readable yet robust enough to orchestrate complex multi-tier application deployments. Being able to push configurations from a control node rather than rely on a pull model or remote agents is a key differentiator.
Ansible adoption continues to grow with companies like IBM, Adobe, Cisco, and Juniper using it to standardize and automate their infrastructure. Its flexibility spans deployments on bare metal, virtual machines, cloud environments, containers, networking equipment and more.
While primarily focused on configuration management and orchestration, Ansible also handles basic provisioning and deployment capabilities. Available modules cover everything from AWS and Kubernetes to Windows and networking gear.
For larger enterprises, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform adds capabilities like automation hub, expanded integrations, credential management, and advanced monitoring.
Terraform
HashiCorp Terraform takes an infrastructure-as-code approach to enable consistent provisioning and management across hybrid or multi-cloud environments.
It allows modeling production infrastructure through code to make changes and updates programmable versus manual. Execution plans give teams visibility into the impact of changes before applying them.
Terraform configurations defined in .tf files use a concise syntax called HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language) that is readable yet capable of provisioning a wide range of infrastructure resources and services.
While Terraform started with a focus on provisioning, its capabilities have expanded into orchestration and lifecycle management spanning infrastructure and applications.
For organizations leveraging multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environments, Terraform makes it easier to prevent cloud vendor lock-in by providing a consistent workflow. Infrastructure-as-code aligns with organizational priorities around governance, compliance, and security.
Prominent users of Terraform include Capital One, Comcast, Segment, Autodesk, and Imperva. For enterprises, Terraform Enterprise adds access controls, policy enforcement, workflow integration, and other premium features.
Docker
Docker has revolutionized how organizations build, deploy, and manage containerized applications. It spearheaded many of the core concepts around containers and modernized development workflows.
Docker enables packaging applications into lightweight standardized units called containers. This makes it possible to build an application on a laptop, test it consistently through the pipeline, then deploy it to any environment without compatibility issues.
Containers provide isolated, portable environments that bundle all dependencies required to run an application. This "build once, run anywhere" approach is transformational.
Docker Swarm provides simple clustering for container orchestration across hosts. Docker Hub acts as a centralized registry for discovering and sharing container images. Integrations are available for all major CI/CD and cloud platforms.
For larger deployments, Docker Enterprise adds management and security capabilities like image scanning, role-based access control, and multi-tenancy features.
Prominent adopters include ADP, GE, Goldman Sachs, Spotify, and Visa. For most organizations leveraging containers, Docker becomes a cornerstone piece of the infrastructure automation stack.
Kubernetes
As containerized applications become more pervasive, Kubernetes has emerged as the leading container orchestration platform. Originally open sourced by Google, Kubernetes clusters schedule and automate deployment, scaling, failover of container workloads.
Kubernetes combines automation functionality from multiple sources like Docker Swarm, Apache Mesos, Google‘s internal Borg system. It provides powerful capabilities for container management including:
- Service discovery and dynamic load balancing
- Automated rollouts and rollbacks
- Storage orchestration
- Secret and configuration management
- Horizontal auto-scaling of pods
These and other features have fueled massive growth in Kubernetes adoption. Leading platforms like Red Hat OpenShift, VMware Tanzu, Amazon EKS, Microsoft AKS, and Google GKE have embraced Kubernetes as the foundation for container orchestration.
Specialized tools like Helm and Operators extend Kubernetes to simplify infrastructure automation tasks like package management, Day 2 operations, and complex stateful application deployments.
Jenkins
Jenkins is the leading open source automation server used by development teams practicing CI/CD. It is extremely extensible through its support for Plugins which provide integrations for virtually every major tool like Git, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS, and more.
Jenkins Pipeine-as-code allows modeling CI/CD workflows through declarative Jenkinsfile configurations checked into source control. This provides many benefits:
- Changes to the pipeline are version controlled
- Settings, scripts, and config are centralized
- Pipelines are easy to replicate across projects
- CI/CD becomes codified into the application lifecycle
While Jenkins is primarily used for application-focused automation, it can plug into infrastructure automation tools via plugins. This allows bridge between app and infrastructure pipelines.
Jenkins X takes Jenkins customization a step further for teams leveraging Kubernetes. It combines Jenkins, Kubernetes, Helm, Nexus, and more into an integrated solution for CI/CD on top of Kubernetes.
Puppet
Puppet provides capabilities ranging from open source Puppet tools to enterprise-grade Puppet Enterprise used by global organizations like eBay, Gap, CERN, Google, and VMWare.
It follows a model-driven approach for defining system configurations where code is used to model the desired state of infrastructure. These definitions then get enforced onto systems managed by Puppet agents.
In addition to configuration management, Puppet also handles orchestration, provisioning, and policy enforcement. The Puppet language uses a declarative syntax allowing administrators to define what the end state should be rather than script out procedural steps.
Puppet integrates tightly with DevOps tools like Docker, Jenkins, and source control systems to bridge gaps between app and infrastructure pipelines. Puppet Enterprise adds advanced features around event processing, visualization, load balancing, and lifecycle management.
HashiCorp Packer
While the other tools focus more broadly across infrastructure automation, Packer by HashiCorp solves the narrow but important problem of automating machine image generation across platforms like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, VMWare, and DigitalOcean.
Packer codifies image generation by creating identical images for multiple platforms from a single configuration. This allows baking in configuration policies, software, scripts, etc required across an organization.
Standardizing images through Packer provides consistency, and makes it fast and simple to launch fully-baked machines. You can also quickly rebuild images to update configurations or vulnerabilities across fleets of machines.
Packer fits nicely into many infrastructure automation stacks by handling the complexities of creating reusable images tailored for specific environments.
Chef
Chef takes a pure automation approach focused heavily on the configuration management and policy enforcement aspects. It utilizes a powerful DSL tailored specifically for infrastructure called Chef Ruby.
Chef works by deploying Chef code in the form of "recipes" and "cookbooks" from a Chef Server to nodes managed by Chef agents. Desired system state is defined through code in cookbooks. Chef manages the process of converging an environment in line with the expected model.
In addition to configuration management, Chef also handles policy definition, compliance scanning, and desired state enforcement. It integrates with cloud platforms, containers, physical hosts, and popular DevOps tooling.
Chef Enterprise adds premium features designed for the complexities of large-scale infrastructure automation. This includes workflow integrations, visibility into change events, and analytics around infrastructure state.
The Evolving Automation Landscape
Beyond these widely adopted platforms, we continue to see new and innovative approaches to infrastructure automation. Serverless computing simplifies infrastructure through event-driven functions without worrying about the underlying servers. Progressive delivery techniques like canary and blue-green deployments transition infrastructure through a series of valid, stable states.
As infrastructure complexity grows exponentially, teams need to thoughtfully curate an automation stack that empowers productivity over creating sprawl. Take an iterative approach to adopting infrastructure-as-code practices. Define standards for how configurations are modeled, tested, approved and promoted through environments. Leverage policies, validations, and rollbacks to enforce governance.
The capabilities highlighted here aim to arm you with the knowledge to build a resilient automation stack tailored to your unique needs. Infrastructure automation marks a cultural shift as much as a technical one.
Emphasizing collaboration, communication, and transparency will ensure automation enables your team versus replacing them. Approach adoption as an evolution, not a revolution. The future of infrastructure is programmable, scalable, and consistent through code.
