Infrastructure as Code, 2nd Edition

Chapter 5. Building Infrastructure Stacks as Code

This chapter combines Chapters 3 and 4 by describing ways to use code to manage infrastructure resources provided from an infrastructure platform.

The concept that I use to talk about doing this is the infrastructure stack. A stack is a collection of infrastructure resources defined and changed together. The resources in a stack are provisioned together to create a stack instance, using a stack management tool. Changes are made to stack code and applied to an instance using the same tool.

This chapter describes patterns for grouping infrastructure resources in stacks.

What Is an Infrastructure Stack?

An infrastructure stack is a collection of infrastructure resources that you define, provision, and update as a unit (Figure 5-1).

You write source code to define the elements of a stack, which are resources and services that your infrastructure platform provides. For example, your stack may include a virtual machine (“Compute Resources”), disk volume (“Storage Resources”), and a subnet (“Network Resources”).

You run a stack management tool, which reads your stack source code and uses the cloud platform’s API to assemble the elements defined in the code to provision an instance of your stack.

Figure 5-1. An infrastructure stack is a collection of infrastructure elements managed as a group

Examples of stack management tools include: ...