Config Management Camp 2023 Ghent

Cloud Native tools like Infrastructure as Code (IaC) & Helm have made managing infrastructure as well as cloud-native apps easier in a lot of ways, but there are many challenges that companies accept as the cost of adopting them. IaC is good at provisioning individual infrastructure components (a few resources together), and tools like helm are good at deploying applications, but engineering teams want an entire environment with various components like networking, platform (ec2/eks), database, k8s apps, etc. to run their business applications.

To provision and teardown an entire environment, these teams have two options. They can either hand-roll imperative pipelines to manage individual components and then manage complex dependencies between these components or create a monolith deployment for the entire environment. These approaches are inefficient and slow down feature development and innovation. They also make replicating, visualizing & understanding environments difficult. What if there were a better way?

This talk digs into these challenges and then looks at how to resolve them. We will introduce Environment as Code (EaC) which is an abstraction over cloud-native tools that provides a declarative way of defining an entire environment. It has a Control Plane that manages the state of the environment, including component dependencies, and detects drift, and enables reconciliation.

Key Takeaways:

• Challenges adopting Cloud Native tools like Infrastructure as Code, Helm, etc.
• What is Environment as Code?
• How can Environment as Code help resolve those challenges?