Thanks to wide adoption of the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach, programmatic provisioning of cloud resources is slowly transforming almost every aspect of computing, with administration of web apps having emerged as a key use case. With IaC, it’s possible to streamline resource management tasks, shorten time-to-market, control costs, and scale at will.

The adoption of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CICD) pipelines is already making a huge difference in web app deployment and cloud resource management. Devops principles like CICD help automate code deployment and updates and deliver them swiftly, minimizing downtime and improving overall efficiency.

Programmatic cloud resource provisioning can increase that impact by several orders of magnitude. This allows for on-demand configuration of the cloud environments needed to run web apps, while also automating vital tasks like creating, updating, and deleting resources. Web app infrastructure managers find that this approach helps ensure consistency, repeatability, and scalability across different cloud environments.

Better Security

Cloud resource provisioning increases security for CICD pipelines for web app management in a climate where cloud security is hard to come by. Version control enables quick disaster recovery by speeding up restoration from backup environments and snapshots.

The right IaC stack also helps enforce security compliance by automating the setup of security groups, firewalls, and access controls. With stronger protection against threats, you can roll out updates and deploy changes with greater confidence. You’ll also reduce the risk of downtime because you can use the same code bases to rapidly redeploy the entire production environment if the server goes down temporarily. Greater Scalability IaC allows admins to automatically prepare, configure, and deploy the resources to support the environments needed for web app hosting and code-based versioning at scale. You can scale resources up and down according to traffic and usage patterns, allowing you to handle variable workloads efficiently.

Cloud resource provisioning also underpins elastic environments, which ensures that development and testing resources are available as needed, even during times of peak demand.

Increased Speed

As well as bringing more scalability and security to web app pipelines, cloud resource provisioning adds speed. Automated provisioning means that web servers, databases, and storage are configured quickly when they’re needed and are ready as fast as possible.

This helps remove bottlenecks in the pipeline and supports seamless deployment of web applications. Using Terraform, the industry standard solution for IaC, it’s easy to set up the configuration state files needed to quickly provision any type of environment needed, and with Terraform Cloud, teams can manage these files remotely.

Consistency Across Deployments

Another advantage of IaC for web apps is that it enforces reproducible environments. Because configuration and deployment are automated, there’s little risk of manual errors creeping in during setup.

Infrastructure components are configured consistently, so you can be confident that development, staging, and production environments are identical. This helps prevent issues of “it works on my machine,” and stops unexpected failures from slowing down CICD pipelines.

Support for Blue-Green Deployments

Blue-green deployments minimize downtime and risk when releasing software updates. This approach involves running the new and the current environments in parallel while you test the new one, so you can be sure that the new environment is verified before making the switch. By running them in parallel, you can easily revert to the previous environment if needed.

IaC makes it easy to provision and run parallel environments, helping enable blue-green deployments by default. It also supports version control, which simplifies tracking and managing changes to the infrastructure through the development cycle and ensures that you can always revert to the previous version.

Improved Testing

Thanks to its ability to swiftly prepare new environments, cloud resource provisioning improves testing capabilities. Once you can quickly create and destroy test environments, you can run integration and load tests dynamically to verify web reliability. This also allows you to run tests and deploy software in parallel, which brings faster feedback loops and increases scalability.

Testing apps and infrastructure in tandem, instead of running changes in a test environment and then transferring them to a production environment, makes the results more reliable because there are always differences between the two environments, which can affect the outcome.

Cost Savings

CICD pipelines also help to lower costs for web app management, and code-based cloud resource provisioning helps here as well. By automating provisioning, you can allocate resources only when needed, like for a surge in build, test, and deployment. Environments are automatically de-provisioned when they’re no longer needed, which stops you paying for web app infrastructure that you aren’t using.

Features like auto-scaling also make sure that the app scales up and down based on real-time demand to avoid over-provisioning. What’s more, resource tagging and monitoring tools help you to track usage and spot cost-saving opportunities.

Performance Management

With strategic resource provisioning, CICD pipelines can be used to improve web app performance and reduce the risk of disasters.

Provision monitoring tools and alert systems can track performance and detect the earliest signs of issues in real-time, so you can maintain higher standards. They also set up and configure load balancers to distribute traffic across multiple instances of web applications, to improve reliability.

IaC for Web App Management

Implementing CICD practices can help automate the deployment and management of web applications. Incorporating IaC principles adds to the power, bringing improved security, scalability, stability, speed, savings, and performance. As the devops mindset takes over more of the IT world, it’s time to integrate it into web app management too.