Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Overview

This document provides an overview of the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach used to manage and provision the infrastructure for the FlowMart e-commerce platform.

What is Infrastructure as Code?

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is an approach to infrastructure management where infrastructure resources are defined and provisioned through machine-readable definition files, rather than through manual processes or interactive configuration tools. This approach allows us to:

Version control our infrastructure definitions alongside our application code
Automate the provisioning and management of infrastructure
Standardize configurations across different environments
Document our infrastructure setup as living code rather than static documentation
Test infrastructure changes before deploying to production

Our IaC Tech Stack

For the FlowMart e-commerce platform, we use the following technologies for our infrastructure management:

Primary Tools

Tool	Purpose
Terraform	Infrastructure provisioning across cloud providers (primary tool)
Kubernetes (K8s)	Container orchestration
Helm Charts	Kubernetes application deployment packaging
GitHub Actions	CI/CD pipeline automation
AWS CloudFormation	Specific AWS infrastructure components

Additional Supporting Tools

Tool	Purpose
Terragrunt	Terraform code organization and management
Packer	Virtual machine image building
Ansible	Configuration management
Prometheus & Grafana	Monitoring and alerting
ELK Stack	Logging

Infrastructure Architecture

Our infrastructure is organized into the following logical components:

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Repository Structure

Our infrastructure code is organized as follows:

infrastructure/
│
├── terraform/                  # Terraform configuration
│   ├── environments/           # Environment-specific configurations
│   │   ├── dev/
│   │   ├── staging/
│   │   └── production/
│   ├── modules/                # Reusable Terraform modules
│   │   ├── networking/
│   │   ├── compute/
│   │   ├── database/
│   │   └── monitoring/
│   └── global/                 # Global resources (e.g., Route53)
│
├── kubernetes/                 # Kubernetes manifests
│   ├── base/                   # Base configurations
│   └── overlays/               # Environment-specific overlays (Kustomize)
│
├── helm-charts/                # Helm charts for application deployment
│
├── scripts/                    # Utility scripts
│
└── packer/                     # Packer templates for image building

Deployment Principles

Infrastructure Changes via Pull Requests: All infrastructure changes must go through a pull request process, with automated testing and reviews.
Environment Promotion: Changes are first deployed to development, then staging, and finally production, with appropriate testing at each stage.
Immutable Infrastructure: We prefer to replace rather than modify infrastructure components.
Least Privilege: We follow the principle of least privilege for all IAM roles and security groups.
Automated Rollbacks: Our CI/CD pipelines include automated rollback capabilities if deployments fail.

Next Steps

For more detailed information about our infrastructure as code setup, please refer to the following documents: