What is infrastructure drift?
Infrastructure drift is something we all would rather avoid. Infrastructure drift occurs when the actual state of your infrastructure diverges from its intended state. It leads to unpredictable behaviour, security risks, and reduced performance. This issue is especially common in cloud environments with dynamic resources, where manual changes can create difficult-to-manage inconsistencies.
Azure’s offerings to prevent infrastructure drift
Azure offers a complete set of services and tools for building, deploying, and managing cloud applications and infrastructure. Its capabilities cover computing, storage, networking, and various managed services. Key features for effective infrastructure management include:
- Azure Bicep: Bicep allows users to deploy, manage, and monitor Azure resources consistently. This domain-specific language (DSL) uses a simple and readable syntax for defining infrastructure and configuration, ensuring clear and repeatable deployments.
- Azure deployment stacks: These stacks let organisations define and deploy a set of Azure resources and policies in a repeatable way, ensuring consistent environment configuration and reducing drift.
- Azure policy: Azure policy enforces organisational standards and checks compliance at scale. It ensures resources meet defined configurations and security requirements.
- Azure DevOps: Azure DevOps offers tools for continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD), automating infrastructure management to minimise manual errors and drift.
Benefits of Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
IaC is a practice where you manage and provision computing infrastructure using machine-readable definition files, instead of configuring physical hardware or using interactive tools. IaC offers several benefits for managing infrastructure:
- Consistency and repeatability: IaC ensures that infrastructure deployments are consistent and repeatable. By using code instead of manual configurations, organization can eliminate variability.
- Version control: IaC files can be stored in version control systems, which enable teams to track changes, roll back versions, and collaborate effectively while maintaining a history of infrastructure states.
- Automation: IaC automates the entire infrastructure lifecycle, from setup to decommissioning. This reduces human error, speeds up deployments, and improves efficiency.
- Scalability: IaC allows organisations to scale their infrastructure quickly and reliably. With predefined templates, scaling operations can be executed seamlessly and consistently.
