Infrastructure as Code, 3rd Edition

Chapter 7. Design Patterns for Infrastructure Deployment Stacks

A Note for Early Release Readers

With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the author’s raw and unedited content as they write—so you can take advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these titles. This will be the 7th chapter of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on. If you have comments about how we might improve the content and/or examples in this book, or if you notice missing material within this chapter, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

TODO

Reconsider naming of monolithic stack. It’s a common terminology, but several reviewer feel that a single stack isn’t inherently bad, so perhaps rename it to make the negative aspect more clear? It’s fair that “single unit” isn’t necessarily the issue; lack of cohesiveness is an issue; but the size in particular, unwieldiness. On the other hand, “monolithic” is a well-known industry term used in this way.

The previous chapter described several levels of infrastructure components, including code libraries, infrastructure compositions, and infrastructure deployment stacks. At the end of the previous chapter I recommended starting by implementing a single level of infrastructure component, eventually evolving into multiple levels as the system and the teams that build and use its infrastructure grow in complexity. Deployment stacks are the fundamental unit of design ...