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

Additional Supporting Tools

Infrastructure Architecture

Our infrastructure is organized into the following logical components:

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

1. Infrastructure Changes via Pull Requests: All infrastructure changes must go through a pull request process, with automated testing and reviews.

2. Environment Promotion: Changes are first deployed to development, then staging, and finally production, with appropriate testing at each stage.

3. Immutable Infrastructure: We prefer to replace rather than modify infrastructure components.

4. Least Privilege: We follow the principle of least privilege for all IAM roles and security groups.

5. 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:

• Terraform Implementation
• Environment Setups
• CI/CD Pipelines