Infrastructure as Code, 3rd Edition

Chapter 9. Integrating Deployment Stacks

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An infrastructure deployment stack is the smallest collection of infrastructure that can be changed independently. Chapter 7 described several design patterns that involve dividing the infrastructure resources for an environment across multiple stacks, to make it easier and safer to change and update parts of the system. However, as discussed in Chapter 5, multiple stacks will usually have dependencies between them. For example, if one stack creates core networking structures like VPCs and subnets, another stacks will need to provision its resources to use those networking structures.

This chapter will define several design patterns for managing dependencies between infrastructure deployment stacks. There are many popular techniques to implement discovery and integration of resources between stacks, but many of these techniques create tight coupling that makes changes more difficult. So ...