Building a Scalable and Highly Available Infrastructure (part 1)
Tags: infrastructureascode, cicd, devops
Published: 2023-11-03 17:46:10

		
_Introduction_

**Achieving Scalable and Highly Available Infrastructure with GitHub Actions and Terraform**

In today's digitally-driven world, where businesses rely on the continuous availability and scalability of their online services, crafting an infrastructure that seamlessly blends scalability and high availability is essential. It is important to leverage DevOps' best practices among which are automation and Infrastructure as code. This guide takes a deep dive into the dynamic duo of Terraform and GitHub Actions, elucidating their roles in empowering teams to build, manage, and scale infrastructure efficiently. 

## Terraform: Sculpting Infrastructure as Code
Terraform, developed by HashiCorp, has rapidly become the go-to tool in the landscape of Infrastructure as Code (IaC). This open-source tool is designed to help developers and system administrators build, change, and version infrastructure efficiently.
						
_Purpose and Use Cases_
Terraform serves a multitude of purposes that underpin its significance:


**Infrastructure Provisioning:** Terraform is the vehicle that carries your infrastructure requirements and turns them into reality. It can create and configure a wide array of resources across various cloud providers and on-premises environments.


**Scalability on Demand:** In a world where spikes in usage can be unpredictable, Terraform offers a dynamic approach to scaling up or down based on your infrastructure requirements. It ensures that you're never caught off guard by surges in traffic. 					
**Collaborative Development:** Terraform plays a pivotal role in fostering teamwork. By enabling teams to collaborate on infrastructure code and store it in version control, it streamlines the development process and minimizes the chances of human errors.
						

## GitHub Actions: The Conductor of CI/CD Orchestration

GitHub Actions, a robust feature provided by GitHub, serves as an invaluable orchestration platform for Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment
(CI/CD) pipelines. Its versatility empowers development teams to streamline their software development workflows by automating various tasks, ultimately enhancing efficiency and reducing the manual overhead that can be associated with these processes.
						
_Purpose and Use Cases:_
GitHub Actions boasts a wide array of use cases, making it a versatile tool for development teams:


**Continuous Integration (CI):** At its core, GitHub Actions is designed to facilitate CI. CI involves the automated building and testing of code changes in a systematic and controlled environment. By incorporating CI into your workflow, you can rest assured that every modification to your code undergoes rigorous testing. This practice helps to detect and rectify issues early in the development cycle, preventing them from infiltrating your production environment. CI safeguards the quality of your codebase and ensures that it consistently meets your project's standards.
						
**Continuous Deployment (CD):** Beyond CI, GitHub Actions extends its capabilities to support CD. CD pipelines play a pivotal role in the deployment of applications and infrastructure. These pipelines automate the process of releasing new updates, ensuring that every deployment is not only efficient but also highly reliable. With CD, you can confidently push changes into production or other target environments, knowing that the deployment process is controlled, consistent, and, most importantly, automated. This automation minimizes human error, accelerates the release cycle, and bolsters the reliability of deployments.
						
**Workflow Automation:** GitHub Actions provides developers with the flexibility to customize and automate various aspects of their development processes. This includes not only CI/CD but also other tasks that can be repetitive and time-consuming. By automating these workflows, developers can promote a smooth and agile work environment. Examples of such automation might include building and deploying Terraform configurations, managing containerized applications, running tests, generating documentation, and more—workflow automation through GitHub Actions results in improved productivity, shorter development cycles, and fewer manual interventions.
						
In essence, GitHub Actions is the conductor of your software development symphony, orchestrating the intricate processes of CI and CD. It empowers developers to embrace automation, ensuring code quality, accelerating deployments, and enabling a more agile and efficient development lifecycle. With GitHub Actions at your disposal, you can optimize your workflows and focus on what matters most: delivering high-quality software to your users. 


Now that we have established an understanding of what these tools are, let's explore how we can use them to design for scalability and high availability.

## Designing Infrastructure for Scalability and High Availability

**Component-based Infrastructure Design:** Terraform offers a modular approach to designing infrastructure which makes the infrastructure easy to maintain and scalable. With Terraform you can define modules for different services like networking, databases, etc this modularity ensures easy replication of infrastructure components.

**Automate Terraform workflows with GitHub Actions:** You can define GitHub Actions to trigger Terraform scripts based on specific events e.g. a merge to the main branch could trigger an automated deployment.

**Infrastructure as Code best practices:** When writing Terraform configurations, make sure you use variables, modules, and reusable components to keep the codebase manageable. Also, ensure that the configurations are version-controlled.

**Scalability:** Auto-scaling configurations could be implemented within your Terraform scripts, GitHub actions can then automate the deployment of the configurations in response to predefined triggers like an increased load.

**Securing Secrets:** The management of sensitive information, such as cloud credentials, involves storing them as GitHub secrets. These secrets are securely retrieved during the CI/CD pipeline, minimizing the risk of unauthorized access.


**Monitoring and Alerts:** GitHub Actions can be used to trigger alerts and responses based on predefined conditions.

**Testing and Validation:** Integrate testing into GitHub actions workflows to ensure that changes to the infrastructure go through extensive testing before deployment.

_Conclusion_	
The synergy between Terraform and GitHub Actions offers a potent approach to building and maintaining infrastructure that can effortlessly scale and remains highly available.