Migrating to IaC

Packing Up and Moving 🚐🛣️

We have spoken extensively about the different types of IaC and why it is a great solution to deploying and managing IT infrastructure in this blog post. But technology the virtual infrastructure technology has been around for quite some time now and plenty of organizations already have their services configured manually. Moving from a legacy environment maintained by teams of engineers running repeated tasks to a modernized automation approach could be daunting. In this article we will discuss what this migration looks like and how to get it done.

Moving Company 🧑‍💼? Or your friends 🧑‍🦱?

When moving to a new home, your confronted with the choice of hiring a moving company or just grabbing all the family and friends you can find to transport all your belongings.

A moving company will effectively and swiftly move all your furniture and things into a truck and quickly drop it off at your new home, at a price. The benefit of this is the ease of mind and minimal effort required since there are people handling this whole job for you. This runs the risk of them damaging your belongings as they do not know you and may not much for your stuff. You also run the risk of them losing some things in the process as they are not as meticulous when tracking what should be taken and where to leave it. Sometimes it goes smoothly, other times it does not. If you go with your friends, you'll probably work slower, break a sweat and have to do multiple trips. But you'll ensure the safety of your belongings and that they all arrive and are placed exactly how you want it.

This analogy pairs nicely with what it is like when choosing how you wish to migrate your infrastructure to IaC. The obvious answer that no one wants to confront is having your team manually look at the current infrastructure and transcribe it into IaC compatible codes step by step. This method is very painstaking but will ensure that you have all your tools, services, permissions, applications, etc. added and configured properly.

However, the new and upcoming solution which would equate to the moving company is AWS' IaC generator.

AWS CloudFormation IaC generator

Using the CloudFormation infrastructure as code generator, templates for your AWS infrastructure can be generated that have been provisioned without the use of CFM before.

Here's a few of the benefits of IaC generator with CloudFormation:

• Brings infrastructure under CloudFormation for easier management and migration later.
• Generates templates automatically without much additional assistance or instruction.
• Use the template to replicate resources across regions.

It works in three steps:

1. Scans resources – Looks at all resources within a region and expires in 30 days.
2. Create template – Can create the template from scratch and add scanned resources and related sources or use an existing CFM stack and add the scanned sources to it.
3. Import resources – use the template with CFM or migrate them into an AWS CDK app.

That was easy!

Migrations in any direction between on-premise, hybrid, and cloud infrastructures are never easy and usually very labor intensive operations for any organization. The bigger the house the bigger and harder the move. AWS' CloudFormation IaC generator is a fantastic tool due to its ease of use and that AWS dominates the majority of the cloud infrastructure market and is on average the most likely cloud provider to be used by a company. At the time of this post there is no alternative IaC generator for Azure, GCP, or any other tool.