Infrastructure as Code

Chapter 2. Dynamic Infrastructure Platforms

This chapter describes different types of dynamic infrastructure platforms, which provide the foundation for provisioning and managing core infrastructure resources. The goal is to understand the typical capabilities and service models available, and the requirements a platform must provide to effectively support infrastructure as code.

What Is a Dynamic Infrastructure Platform?

A dynamic infrastructure platform is a system that provides computing resources, particularly servers, storage, and networking, in a way that they can be programmatically allocated and managed.

Table 2-1 lists several types of dynamic infrastructure platforms with examples. The best-known examples are public IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) cloud services like AWS, and private IaaS products like OpenStack. But infrastructure can also be managed dynamically using virtualization systems such as VMware vSphere, which don’t meet the definition of cloud. (I’ll define cloud a bit later in this chapter.) And some organizations automate the provisioning and management of bare-metal physical hardware, using tools such as Cobbler or Foreman.

Table 2-1. Examples of dynamic infrastructure platforms

Type of Platform	Providers or Products
Public IaaS cloud	AWS, Azure, Digital Ocean, GCE, and Rackspace Cloud
Community IaaS cloud	Cloud services shared between governmental departments
Private IaaS cloud	CloudStack, OpenStack, and VMware vCloud
Bare-metal ...