[ SRE_ARENA ]
INFRASTRUCTURE AS CODE

Infrastructure as Code: ClickOps is Dead

DOWNLOADING CONCEPT: 1. THE CLICKOPS ANTI-PATTERN...
  • ↳Historically, sysadmins built infrastructure by logging into the AWS Console and clicking buttons to create EC2 instances and VPCs.
  • ↳This is called ClickOps.
  • ↳ClickOps is a disaster for three reasons: - No Audit Trail: If the production database goes down, you have no idea *who* clicked the delete button or *when*.
  • ↳- Not Reproducible: You cannot easily clone your Production environment to create a Staging environment.
  • ↳- Human Error: Clicking the wrong dropdown can expose an S3 bucket to the public internet.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

solves this by defining your entire cloud architecture in plaintext code (like HashiCorp Configuration Language - HCL), storing it in Git, and deploying it via CI/CD pipelines.

▲ LIVE INCIDENTTerraform apply is failing with 'Error acquiring the state lock'. Your CI/CD pipeline crashed yesterday during an apply.
sre@arena:~/iac
sre@arena:~$ aws dynamodb get-item --table-name terraform-locks --key '{"LockID": {"S": "prod-db/terraform.tfstate"}}'