Automating all the things, including infrastructure
I'm a big advocate for automation, from having a reproducible Docker and Docker Compose environment, automated tests, static analysis, and code linting in my projects to running them automatically on every push to a remote repository using a CI pipeline.
I've written scripts to simplify common complex tasks and automated my local development environment setup before using tools like Ansible and, recently, the Nix package manager, NixOS and Home Manager.
Another main piece of automation I use is to create and manage the infrastructure my applications run in.
I've talked about it in my Deploying PHP applications with Ansible and Ansistrano talk, that before you can deploy an application, you need a server with the required packages installed to run it. You may also need a CDN endpoint, SSL certificate, DNS records, CORS policy, database server, container registry, object storage bucket or a number of various other things.
Using automation tools like Terraform, Pulumi or Ansible, you can run a single command to create, update or destroy resources or your entire stack.
The automation code acts as living documentation, can be version-controlled, stored alongside the code, and read by the Developers or anyone else involved with the project.
If you need to hand over the hosting requirements to a client or create their own version, you can do that with the same automation code.
And if a disaster scenario was to happen and you needed to recreate your infrastructure from scratch or move to a different cloud provider, you could do that quickly using automation tools, knowing that the new infrastructure would be consistent with the original, all of the pieces would be in place, and without needing to recreate everything manually from scratch.
- Oliver
