Immutable Infrastructure

Chapter 2. Immutable Infrastructure in Action

Using immutable infrastructure for the first time has a learning curve. It’s a paradigm shift. But you don’t have to go all in to reap the benefits. You can make parts of your infrastructure immutable. In this chapter, we’ll:

• Discuss some tools and technologies that exist in the marketplace and provide example implementations using those. At present, the most popular cloud is Amazon Web Services (AWS), so we’ll walk through an example in that context and also one that is non-AWS specific but illustrates a common use case. (See “Immutable Infrastructure in the Toolchain”.)

• Against that backdrop, we’ll do a bit of “best practices” analysis, walking through good immutable infrastructure candidates in your existing and greenfield applications across compute, storage, network, and management services commonly available on clouds. (See “Best Practices: How to Make Your Application Immutable”.)

• As we consider normative patterns and modes of working with cloud resources, we’ll illustrate a unified approach emerging in the immutable infrastructure landscape that relies on cloud OS modeling rather than customized toolchains. (See “Immutable Infrastructure in a Unified System”.)

For big, complex deployments involving multiple team members, integrating immutable patterns into your workflow involves significant automation and testing, but it pays off. The system will be efficient with its use of resources and resilient to infrastructure quality ...