What is DevOps Infrastructure? Key Components & Benefits

DevOps infrastructure includes the underlying systems, tools, and processes that support the continuous integration, delivery, and deployment of software in a DevOps environment.

Infrastructure can refer to many different things. It’s the combination of cloud resources, compute instances, and configuration that enables you to operate workloads successfully. Infrastructure provides the foundation for running your code and storing generated data.

Small projects might have only a few infrastructure components, such as an AWS Lambda function and an S3 object storage bucket. However, enterprise teams often use thousands of infrastructure resources from many different providers, each of which must be robustly configured and secured.

Key components of DevOps infrastructure

Infrastructure component types commonly found in DevOps teams include:

• Version Control Systems (VCS)
• Cloud compute instances (e.g., EC2 virtual machines)
• Database instances
• Kubernetes clusters
• Storage volumes
• Load balancers and other networking components
• Credentials and identity management solutions
• Developer portals and internal developer platforms

DevOps infrastructure management vs traditional infrastructure management

Traditional infrastructure management suits legacy systems with static requirements. DevOps infrastructure management offers significant advantages over traditional approaches in terms of speed, reliability, efficiency, and scalability. While it requires a cultural shift and investment in new skills and tools, the benefits are well worth the effort for organizations that want to thrive in today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape.

DevOps infrastructure resources have different management requirements from those of traditional IT operations. Whereas legacy infrastructure like on-premises servers and virtual machines usually changes infrequently, cloud environments are dynamic and often short-lived. You need clear visibility into what’s running in your accounts so you can check that resources are configured correctly.

Fortunately, DevOps-based infrastructure also makes effective management easier. You can use automated tools and processes to configure your resources, eliminating the need for developers to set them up manually. This unlocks more efficient self-service workflows that are available on-demand.

Which tool is commonly used for infrastructure automation in DevOps?

Terraform is the most commonly used tool for infrastructure automation in DevOps. It enables infrastructure as code (IaC), allowing teams to define and manage infrastructure using configuration files. Other popular tools include OpenTofu, Ansible, Kubernetes, and Jenkins. Each tool serves a specific purpose, and teams often combine them to create a robust automation workflow.

DevOps infrastructure management is easiest when it’s automated and reproducible. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform and Pulumi can be used with CI/CD pipelines to deploy changes using a GitOps workflow. Committing changes to your IaC files then automatically updates your live infrastructure.

IaC also ensures you can reliably reproduce your configuration in the future. You can apply your existing infrastructure config to new environments by simply repeating the IaC tool, preventing discrepancies from occurring. Moreover, IaC simplifies incident recovery as you can roll back to previous configurations by reverting your Git commits.

DevOps tools are only one part of a DevOps infrastructure strategy, however. It’s also important to establish a strong collaborative culture where all stakeholders are involved in infrastructure decisions. For instance, asking for developer input on new infrastructure options increases the likelihood of finding the optimal solution.

Here’s how to implement a dependable DevOps infrastructure:

1. Plan your infrastructure architecture

The first step is to plan your infrastructure’s requirements, including which resources you need, how they’ll be managed, and how data will flow between different components. This information can then be used to evaluate infrastructure options from different providers and identify the most effective solution.

Planning should also consider your possible future requirements. Check that your proposed design offers sufficient capacity to scale up as your service grows. It’s vital to optimally balance performance, cost, and scalability by choosing resources that can either expand dynamically or that would be easy to replace later.

2. Implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

By the end of the previous step, you should know what your DevOps infrastructure will look like. For example, you might have decided to run a Kubernetes cluster in Amazon EKS, supported by some S3 buckets and a DynamoDB database.

You can now progress to provisioning your resources using IaC. Logging into your AWS account and manually setting things up in the web console is time-consuming, error-prone, and hard to reproduce in the future. IaC lets you manage your infrastructure in the same way as your source code, guaranteeing consistency and repeatability.

Here are some of the IaC tools available for different use cases:

• Terraform (and open-source fork OpenTofu) is the leading choice for managing cloud resources. It uses its own HCL language (Hashicorp Configuration Language) to model your infrastructure. 
• Pulumi is a popular alternative that lets you write IaC configs to manage infrastructure resources in familiar programming languages — including Go, JavaScript, and Python. 
• Configuration management solutions like Ansible can be used to install packages, execute tasks, and adjust settings on provisioned compute instances.

Investigate which IaC solutions work with the infrastructure services you’ve chosen, as well as your other development tools and workflows. You can then write IaC configs that describe the expected state of your infrastructure. The resources will be automatically provisioned when you run the tool, saving time and preventing errors.

3. Enable automated infrastructure deployments

Infrastructure management is easiest to maintain when it’s fully automated. IaC is a good starting point, but it needs to be integrated into a continuous delivery (CD) workflow to eliminate manual processes completely. Otherwise, you’ll have to wait for team members to run the IaC tool each time changes are ready to deploy.

A CI/CD system like GitHub Actions or Jenkins allows you to trigger IaC rollouts automatically whenever files in your repository change. This reduces deployment times and makes your infrastructure management process even more consistent. All team members can apply infrastructure changes without having to install the IaC tool locally and configure cloud credentials.

4. Monitor infrastructure and iterate on improvements

DevOps infrastructure shouldn’t stay still. Monitoring your environments to detect inefficiencies, misconfigurations, and potential cost and performance improvements is a critical part of modern infrastructure management.

Using observability suites like Prometheus, Grafana, Fluentd, and your cloud provider’s monitoring dashboards keeps you informed of what’s happening in your infrastructure. You can use your IaC tool to deploy iterative improvements regularly and review the monitoring data to check that infrastructure KPIs like utilization and cost are being met.

It’s also important to monitor and resolve infrastructure drift. Drift occurs when the configuration of your live resources differs from that defined in your IaC files. It’s often caused by failed dependencies, conflicting tools, or team members inadvertently making manual config changes. 

Finding and fixing drift ensures your DevOps infrastructure stays running as it should, avoiding security breaches and compliance failings.

Using IaC and CI/CD to implement infrastructure management benefits the entire DevOps loop. Leveraging automated collaborative tools makes infrastructure changes safer and easier, enabling faster innovation that can match the development pace of your apps and services.

Here are some of the key advantages DevOps practices bring:

• Easier collaboration: Developers can independently edit IaC files to make necessary infrastructure updates, while operators maintain control by reviewing changes before deployment, ensuring security and compliance remain intact.
• Enable on-demand provisioning: IaC configs can be reused in multiple environments, making it possible to bring up new development or staging instances on demand.
• Simplified maintenance processes: Using one process for all infrastructure changes makes maintenance workflows more consistent, reducing the risk of errors.
• Quicker incident resolution: Infrastructure incidents can be rapidly addressed by committing changes to your IaC files and then using your CI/CD system to update the affected resources. You can effortlessly roll back to previous states to recover from misconfigurations.
• Improved scalability: DevOps infrastructure management automates key processes and makes them more modular and reusable. You can easily add more resources to existing environments, making infrastructure adaptable to changes in user demand.
• Cost reduction opportunities: Smart resource allocation through automation eliminates unnecessary spending. Unused servers can be shut down automatically, and teams spend less time on manual maintenance, lowering operational costs.
• Centralized visibility into all resources: You can manage all your cloud resources across multiple accounts and providers using a single IaC repository.

To summarize, making infrastructure an essential part of DevOps lets you operate your cloud resources using principles applicable to streamlining software development. This improves flexibility in all aspects of your infrastructure workflows.

Although DevOps strategies make infrastructure management simpler and more repeatable, creating your own implementation may be challenging initially. Some of the problems you could encounter include:

• Too many tools, platforms, and credentials: Large-scale systems often have complex infrastructure involving many different components from multiple cloud providers. It can be challenging to connect these platforms together and safely manage all of your credentials.
• It’s hard to gain visibility into resources: It’s not always easy to check what’s running in each environment or find who created a resource and why it’s required. This wastes infrastructure capacity when old deployments stay running even after they’re no longer used.
• Unexpected errors caused by configuration drift: Configuration drift may be hard to detect without dedicated tooling that can compare your infrastructure’s current state to your config files.
• Poor utilization and impaired cost-efficiency: Ineffective infrastructure management leads to inefficient resource allocation, which will increase cloud bills.

Focusing on the four infrastructure management phases we set out above can mitigate these challenges. A cycle of robust planning, IaC, automation, and monitoring supports optimal infrastructure operations at scale, maximizing the performance and reliability of your workloads.

Looking for a single platform to manage all your DevOps infrastructure? Spacelift combines IaC and CI/CD in one automated collaborative workflow. It orchestrates your IaC tools and runs them automatically as you edit the config files in your Git repositories. There’s no need to manually configure clunky pipelines that run commands like (terraform|pulumi) apply.

Spacelift doesn’t just run IaC, though — it also tracks the state of your live infrastructure, letting you monitor all your resources from a single pane of glass. You can use Spaces to assign developers access to specific infrastructure components protected by granular code-defined policies. The platform also enables simple self-service access to infrastructure workflows via templated Blueprints.

Spacelift is a great way to implement the third and fourth steps in the DevOps infrastructure management strategy outlined above. It’s an all-in-one solution for automating IaC, enabling infrastructure collaboration, and enforcing precise governance policies. There’s support for IaC tools, including Terraform, OpenTofu, Kubernetes, Ansible, Pulumi, CloudFormation, and more.

Learn more about what you can do with Spacelift.

Infrastructure components and their management form a crucial DevOps pillar. Cloud platforms have made infrastructure options more varied and flexible, but they also present unique challenges around consistency, observability, and security. You need to choose infrastructure components that meet your team’s operational requirements and implement a management strategy that ensures you can govern your resources effectively.

Spacelift is an automated platform that fully orchestrates infrastructure management using IaC. It lets you provision, control, and collaborate on infrastructure all in one place without having to manually set up complex CI/CD pipelines. You can standardize your infrastructure processes and dependably enforce governance policies at scale.

Book a demo today to learn how Spacelift can accelerate your infrastructure operations.