Infrastructure as Code, 3rd Edition

Chapter 7. Design Patterns for Infrastructure Deployment Stacks

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The previous chapter described several levels of infrastructure components, including code libraries, infrastructure products, 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 for infrastructure as code, because they are the unit that infrastructure as code tools provision. So these are the first type of component to explore.

A infrastructure deployment stack is an Architectural Quantum, defined as, “an independently deployable component with high functional cohesion, which includes all the structural elements required for the system to function correctly.”¹ In other words, a stack ...