Cloud Native Infrastructure with Azure

Chapter 2. Infrastructure as Code: Setting Up the Gateway

The cloud, with its rich assortment of solutions offering everything from effortless networking to “planet-scale” computing, is becoming the de facto home for most organizations regardless of their size. The ecosystem of most cloud providers is now larger than ever and includes simple virtual machines, complicated managed clusters, and even highly sophisticated infrastructure. Microsoft Azure, for example, offers a variety of well-built services for end users. These solutions are built on top of infrastructure that is resilient by nature, and they have well-defined service-level agreements (SLAs)¹ to meet the needs of all customers, from small start-ups to large enterprises.

While the dynamic nature of cloud computing is a boon for organizations, it can be challenging to maintain services in cloud environments as your organization grows. As you leverage more and more cloud-based services to support your growing business needs, you quickly realize you can no longer maintain your applications and underlying infrastructure by simply clicking into the web console each time you want to perform a new action. The evolutionary design of the cloud was built upon previous generations of hardware and virtualized infrastructure with a programmable control plane that provides flexibility in the form of API layers. These APIs are leveraged by infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tooling to enable cloud practitioners to easily maintain their ...