Infrastructure as Code

Chapter 6. Patterns for Provisioning Servers

Part I of this book described the tooling involved in creating and configuring infrastructure elements. Now Part II will delve into patterns for using these tools.

There is more to an infrastructure than servers, but creating, configuring, and changing servers generally takes the most time and energy. So the bulk of Part II focuses on provisioning and updating servers. However, many of the patterns and approaches described for servers can also be applied to other infrastructure elements such as networking devices and storage, although they can often be simplified.

The Structure of Part II

There are separate chapters for provisioning servers, managing server template images, and managing changes to servers. The final chapter of Part II moves to the higher level, building on the patterns for server management to describe approaches to managing multiple infrastructure elements and environments.

As defined in Chapter 3, provisioning is the process of making an element, such as a server, ready to use. This involves assigning resources to the element, instantiating it, configuring it, and then registering it with infrastructure services such as monitoring and DNS. At the end of the provisioning process, the element is ready for use.

An effective provisioning process based on infrastructure as code has the following characteristics:

• Any existing infrastructure element can be effortlessly rebuilt on demand.

• A new element can be defined ...