Infrastructure Automation Tools: How to Optimise Your IT Processes

Automation has nowadays become a key tool in the optimisation of countless processes. That’s why there are various tools out there on the market that deal with optimising these processes so that software solutions can be developed faster and have more resilient systems. In DevOps practices, an important element of automation are infrastructure automation tools that help automate the management of infrastructure and servers, and accomplish tasks faster.

Let’s take a closer look a this topic and see which are some of the most popular infrastructure automation tools.

What is Infrastructure Automation?

Infrastructure automation implies the use of certain tools that help us with the automated management and maintenance of IT resources. This includes servers, virtual machines, cloud, containers and other components that make up the infrastructure. What is the task of these tools? Reduce the need for repetitive tasks. In addition, the possibility of human error is brought to a minimum. Result? More efficient and reliable process implementation.

And who primarily deals with infrastructure automation? DevOps engineers, system admins and cloud architects. These are experts who design, implement and maintain scripts. They also deal with the maintenance of processes that allow the infrastructure to be easily adapted, depending on what the development itself requires.

Which Infrastructure Automation Tools Are Best?

Of course, infrastructure automation is nothing without the proper tools that help facilitate it. So here are the top 5 tools that make life easier in this regard.

1) Terraform

Terraform is certainly one of the most popular tools in this field. It is an open-source product, popular among DevOps engineers due to its intuitive nature and ease of use.
What Terraform enables is defining the infrastructure with the help of declarative configurations. The way it works is most often using HCL — HashiCorp Configuration Language. After that, the aforementioned configurations are used to create, update and delete infrastructure resources in various resources — automatically. And environments can be massive public clouds such as AWS, Azure or Google Cloud.

Why Use Terraform?

• Its declarative approach: Terraform takes care of the implementation while the user defines the required state of the infrastructure, without the need for extensive scripts.
• Extensive support opportunities: What Terraform is known for is that it has a vast number of provider plugins, which can support a wide array of both services and technologies.
• Plan/Apply mechanism: When we talk about this useful mechanism, this tool first creates a change plan, and only then starts applying the task. In other words, the engineer can first see exactly what will change before the change itself.
• Configuration versioning: This means that config data can be tracked in systems like Git. The benefit? Higher efficiency and better collaboration among team members.

2) Ansible

Another frequently used tool for infrastructure automation. What distinguishes it from Terraform is the principle of operation — and that is the ‘agentless’ approach. When using Ansible, it is not necessary to install any special software on the server except for SSH or WinRM on Windows systems.

Another feature of Ansible are the so-called playbooks, or YAML files in which tasks and configurations are written. And that helps make them easier to understand by a wider number of experts.

Why Use Ansible?

• Simple implementation: Due to its agentless approach, deploying Ansible is a piece of cake
• Declarative & imperative approach: This tool supports declarative patterns, and it also allows for imperative instructions on what tasks to do and in what order.
• Big user community: Ansible community is big. And this means that there is also a large number of users with extensive documentation – this enables the active publication of new roles and modules for various needs.

3) Puppet

One of the oldest and most well-known infrastructure automation tools is Puppet. When using Puppet, each target server has an agent installed. And this agent applies config rules from the main Puppet server. Puppet follows the declarative configuration model and the agent-server architecture — this concept is especially suitable for more complex/enterprise environments. For example, when changes need to be distributed and monitored in real time.

Why Use Puppet?

• Years-long presence: Like Ansible, Puppet has a large community and therefore extensive documentation.
• Declarative language: Configurations are written in Puppet DSL (Domain Specific Language). This makes larger systems easier to read and maintain.
• Modules & extensions: There are numerous both official and user modules, so for practically every need there is an already existing solution, which makes the work of experts like DevOps engineers immensely easier.

4) Chef

Another infrastructure automation tool that could be considered one of the pioneers in the area is Chef. Its principle is the agent-server architecture and the utilisation of Ruby ‘cookbooks’ and ‘recipes’ for defining configurations.

The fact that it has agent-server architecture makes it similar to Ansible, and it makes it a very flexible tool to work with. However, since it’s a Ruby-based tool, it can be a bit harder to learn for those with less experience.

Why Use Chef?

• Vast ecosystem: One of the key benefits is the extensive ecosystem of ready-made ‘cookbooks’ and ‘recipes’ for a wide range of technologies.
• Code-based model: All configuration aspects are written in Ruby programming language. This gives Chef a lot of flexibility, but as a ‘downside’ for the less experience, it requires being skilled in coding.
• Chef Automate: This enterprise platform allows teams to collaborate effortlessly — with additional features such as analytics, visualisation and control mechanisms for the teams.

5) SaltStack

The final infrastructure automation tool we’ll be talking about is SaltStack. It’s open-source and it combines both the agent-server architecture and the agentless approach.

It’s known for its speed and scalability, especially in larger environments where managing a vast number of servers is a must. This is where YAML steps in as it’s used by SaltStack for defining configuration.

Why Use SaltStack?

• Ease of communication: SaltStack makes it easy to efficiently send commands to a large number of systems. This is made possible by using ZeroMQ for asynchronous communication.
• Modularity: To make it easier to structure the code into reusable modules, there is also the possibility of modularity. SaltStack has a very rich collection of modules and integrations with different technologies.
• States & pillars: What’s also useful about SaltStack are states and pillars. States are YAML-based configurations, whereas pillars are additional data. This SaltStack feature allows for centralised management and easier adaptation of different environments.

6) Pulumi

One of the new, but increasingly used and popular tools for infrastructure automation is Pulumi. What sets it apart from others is that programming languages ​​can be used for infrastructure automation because Pulumi allows you to write infrastructure as code. Some of the languages ​​that coders with a strong set of skills can use are, for example, Go, Python, or C#.

Why use Pulumi?

• Infrastructure as code (Iac): Unlike the previously mentioned tools, Pulumi allows the use of programming languages ​​— and this gives DevOps engineers and other professionals more room for adjustments and reusability.
• State management: Which changes are needed to comply with the required config? Pulumi maintains the infrastructure state (just like Terraform does it too) so that changes can be adjusted more easily.
• Cross-cloud support: This tool seamlessly works and integrates with Google Cloud, AWS, Azure, etc.

7) Crossplane

Last but not least, Crossplane. Like Terraform and SaltStack, Crossplane is an open-source tool. But its ‘unique selling point’ is that it merges infrastructure automation with the Kubernetes container orchestration system. The result? Providing a ‘Kubernetes-like’ way of resource management.

Crossplane is deeply integrated with the Kubernetes API, it has a declarative approach in the full sense and also allows infrastructure to be defined as code, but also orchestrated through an existing CI/CD process. More specifically, this means that all configuration can be tracked, versioned and verified through standard GitOps or CI/CD practices.

Why use Crossplane?

• Use of CRD: Crossplane uses Kubernetes Custom Resource Definitions (CRD) so that various infrastructure resources can be managed in the same way as ‘native’ Kubernetes objects.
• Role separation: Another feature of this infrastructure automation tool is the option to separate platform engineers and application teams. The difference between the two is that platform engineers define resources, whereas application teams use these resources — and they do not need to necessarily have vast knowledge on cloud providers.
• Extensive cloud support: Crossplane currently supports Google Cloud, AWS, Azure, and a number of other systems, and the Crossplane community continues to develop additional extensions.

Why are these tools essential for modern IT processes?

Now that we have listed these five tools, we’ve brought closer the importance of infrastructure automation itself for today’s needs in the IT sector. The common goal of all these tools is automation and the increase in work efficiency while reducing the manual work. Therefore, DevOps engineers, system admins and others who deal with field of work can work on more complex tasks, while repetitive routine tasks can be assigned to these tools analysed in the article.

What’s noticeable is that companies that use these tools and have an infrastructure automation process in a well-established manner, have faster software delivery and adapt to the market faster. And nowadays the market is volatile and sometimes — truth be told — ruthless. That’s why it’s important to be prepared for all potential shocks in dynamic surroundings of nowadays, especially when cloud services and container technologies are becoming increasingly important.

AI & Infrastructure Automation

Of course, nowadays, artificial intelligence and machine learning are becoming more and more integrated into infrastructure automation tools’ work. As it’s quite known pretty much everywhere by now, AI helps in all fields of technology in decision-making processes and risk assessment. Talking about risk assessment, an essential feature of AI in infrastructure automation is the ability to predict potential issues before their very occurrence. For example, analytics driven by AI predicting capabilities can evaluate system behaviour and offer experts help to adjust the system; and ultimately, improve its efficiency.

Conclusion

In this article, we’ve shown the importance of infrastructure automation in today’s time and age, and presented the 5 most popular tools that serve to make this process flow easier. Nowadays, DevOps and CI/CD are the standard in software development, and the same goes for infrastructure automation.

Which exact tool to choose depends on your business needs, but the fact is that Terraform, Ansible, Puppet, Chef, and SaltStack (as well as other tools on the market) enable easier management of complex environments. Each of them has its own special benefits, and the best, optimal solution can be found for each different case.

After all, infrastructure automation and the tools that deal with this lead to reduced costs and time resources, less opportunity for human error, and ultimately, easier and faster delivery of your software product or service.

Our team of DevOps engineers is highly skilled in this area, so don’t hesitate to schedule a consultation with us in case you need these services.