Posted on

Terraforming Your Cloud Infrastructure The Right Way

“Greenfield” vs “Brownfield” Projects In IaaC

According to many authors, software architectures come from two different types of projects. In the first place, there are the “Greenfield” projects. Which are brand new projects; this means the software engineering team starts implementing the architecture without any antecedent. Then, there are the “Brownfield” projects. These are projects that already have a history. The architecture was thought differently and the implementations follow accordingly. Brownfield’s meaning is that the team needs to figure out how to transition to the new architecture. In summary, there is no need to start from scratch, but the challenge is to switch to the desired architecture.

My experience in infrastructure is analogous to what I’ve mentioned in the previous paragraph. There are projects that start with IaaC and others that don’t. On one hand, Greenfield projects use IaaC, the team has the required coding skills, and a CI/CD like workflow is already implemented; at least partially. On the other hand, Brownfield projects require many extra steps and involve more complexity. The migration requires time for adoption and a well thought and planned pipeline. In this article, I’ll sum up my experience with a Brownfield project in IaaC.

Posted on

Create Multiple Instances in a VPC Using Terraform

Rather than directly diving into the Terraform scripts, let's quickly learn about what is Terraform and how IBM Cloud Schematics simplifies the Terraform scripting experience on IBM Cloud.

What is Terraform?

Terraform is an open-source software, developed by HashiCorp, that enables predictable and consistent provisioning of IBM Cloud platform, classic infrastructure, and VPC infrastructure resources by using a high-level scripting language. You can use Terraform to automate your IBM Cloud resource provisioning, rapidly build complex, multi-tier cloud environments, and enable Infrastructure as Code (IaC).

Posted on

Secure Terraform Delivery Pipeline – Best Practices

With the beginning of the cloud era, the need for automation of cloud infrastructure has become essential. Although still very young (version 0.12), Terraform has already become the leading solution in the field of Infrastructure-as-Code. A completely new tool in an emerging area, working in a new programming model – this brings a lot of questions and doubts, especially when handling business-essential cloud infrastructure. 

At GFT, we face challenges of delivering Terraform deployments at scale: on top of all major cloud providers, supporting large organizations in the highly regulated environment of financial services, with multiple teams working in environments in multiple regions around the world. Automation of Terraform delivery while ensuring proper security and mitigation of common risks and errors is one of the main topics across our DevOps teams.

Posted on

Cloud Computing: How Does it Benefit Your Business?

The International Data Group study shows that in 2018, 69% of businesses were already cloud-based while 18% were only planning to get on board with digitalization. Hundreds of companies around the globe are talking about the benefits of cloud computing while you are reading this article!

Nearly two decades ago, cloud computing became a breakthrough in delivering computing power to business. Thanks to large-scale data centers connected to high speed, low cost, broadband networks, users can have secure access to more business apps on more devices wherever they are 24/7. It's no wonder that traditional onsite computer facilities are struggling to keep up.

Posted on

Provisioning Servers in the Cloud With Terraform

Today there are many tools for the provisioning of infrastructure: Vagrant, CloudFormation, OpenStack Heat, and many others. This article speaks about Terraform: the best software tool for provisioning in the cloud under various important aspects.

Terraform is an open source infrastructure as code tool created by Hashicorp and written in Go. With Terraform, you can describe your infrastructure as code, define the provider,  and deploy and update your app. It is important to mention that the Terraform is not a configuration management tool.