It's no secret that various bugs and failures often occur because the production environment was out of sync.

Resolving such issues is often way too time-consuming, and that's why handling the environment drift within the release pipeline is pivotal for achieving increased speed, lowering risks, and reducing costs.

With that said, it's about time to talk about Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and its multiple advantages.

IaC is a key practice for the management of any modern infrastructure. The benefits IaC brings to software projects are undoubtful: 

• configuration consistency;
• automation;
• deployment speed;
• minimizing human error risks through immutability;
• reduced maintenance and management overhead;
• reusability and repeatability;
• accountability;
• security enhancement;
• cost savings through deployment speed, automation.

As you can see, it's challenging to neglect or overlook the numerous benefits that IaC brings to the table.  

To achieve and increase the benefits of IaC for software projects, we learned and embraced the following rules while using Terraform: 

• Avoid manual infrastructure changes.
  Any change applied manually could be lost during the next Terraform run. As a result, you can compromise the stability of the infrastructure.
  
  
• Use Terraform state file shared storage and locking mechanisms. 
  You are likely to use shared storage to ensure your current infrastructure state is consistent and up to date for other collaborators. A locking mechanism is highly recommended to avoid concurrent infrastructure changes.

• Use modules to reuse predefined resources.
  Module versioning is another recommended feature that can be implemented with git tagging or branching. 

• Define outputs. 
  Outputs are needed to enable modules to export the required information. Define outputs for resources even if you don't need them at the moment. Otherwise, you will have to edit your module if required for another resource you want to deploy. 
  
  
• Use Terraform interpolation.  
  It allows resourcing attributes, call functions, arithmetic and logical operations, referencing variables, etc. Explore interpolations features at https://www.Terraform.io/docs/configuration-0-11/interpolation.html.
  
  
• Terraform structure. 
  Terraform provides two ways of structuring: workspace and folder. Workspaces mainly reduce code usage, but it requires greater attention to the workspace you are currently working on, as it is not shown while applying changes. On the other hand, folder structure comes with duplicated code and more folders for large projects, although it provides a clearer environment definition. 

IaC is a key approach to any infrastructure management. Every IaC tool has powerful features that need to be learned and implemented to use all its benefits. In this blog, we tried to emphasize what we learned during our experience with Terraform. It is a powerful tool to define and deploy infrastructure in a maintainable and controllable manner. Using these rules can help you increase security, save costs, automate infrastructure deployment and allow DevOps engineers to focus on their primary job — providing business value.