El uso de pipelines de entrega continua para orquestar el proceso de entrega de software se ha vuelto un concepto popular. Herramientas de CI/CD pueden ser usadas para testear configuraciones de servidores (ej: Packer), aprovisionamiento de ambientes (ej: Terraform, CloudFormation) y la integración de ambientes. El uso de pipelines para infraestructura como código permite encontrar errores antes de que los cambios sean aplicados en los entornos operacionales - incluyendo entornos utilizados para desarrollo y test. También ofrecen una manera de asegurar que las herramientas de infraestructuras se están ejecutando consistentemente, utilizando agentes CI/CD en vez de workstations individuales. Nuestros equipos han tenido buenos resultados utilizando esta técnica en sus proyectos.
The use of continuous delivery pipelines to orchestrate the release process for software has become a mainstream concept. However, automatically testing changes to infrastructure code isn’t as widely understood. Continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) tools can be used to test server configuration (e.g., Chef cookbooks, Puppet modules, Ansible playbooks), server image building (e.g., Packer), environment provisioning (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation) and integration of environments. The use of pipelines for infrastructure as code enables errors to be found before changes are applied to operational environments — including environments used for development and testing. They also offer a way to ensure that infrastructure tooling is run consistently, from CI/CD agents, as opposed to being run from individual workstations. Some challenges remain, however, such as the longer feedback loops associated with standing up containers and virtual machines. Still, we've found this to be a valuable technique.
The use of continuous delivery pipelines to orchestrate the release process for software has become a mainstream concept. However, automatically testing changes to infrastructure code isn’t as widely understood. Continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) tools can be used to test server configuration (e.g., Chef cookbooks, Puppet modules, Ansible playbooks), server image building (e.g., Packer), environment provisioning (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation) and integration of environments. The use of pipelines for infrastructure as code enables errors to be found before changes are applied to operational environments — including environments used for development and testing. They also offer a way to ensure that infrastructure tooling is run consistently, from CI/CD agents, as opposed to being run from individual workstations. Some challenges remain, however, such as the longer feedback loops associated with standing up containers and virtual machines. Still, we've found this to be a valuable technique.
