After migrating to AWS, what’s next? Optimise by embracing infrastructure as code

Building a strong and optimised foundation in the cloud for your organisation means embracing infrastructure as code (IaC) to manage your systems. Fortunately, if you’re considering – or in the process of – migrating to Amazon Web Services (AWS), you’ll find many AWS-native tools and services to support this modern approach to infrastructure management.

As an AWS Premier Partner with competencies in migration, DevOps and security, SoftwareOne understands how to help customers optimise their move to infrastructure as code and make the most of the benefits that IaC can deliver.

So, what does it mean to embrace IaC thinking? It means managing your infrastructure as if it were software, rather than manually handling tasks. When you deploy infrastructure resources properly, IaC allows you to automate more, streamline processes, automatically manage resource dependencies and apply changes easily and consistently across your systems. It supports continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines for faster innovation, with improved scalability and better support for best practices. The bottom line: it helps you become a more efficient, modern and digital organisation. And it can save you money too.

Common issues with infrastructure as code

If you’re migrating to AWS for the first time, IaC might not be your top priority. Typically, organisations initially focus on replicating, as much as possible, their on-premises environment in the cloud. Optimisation and modernisation come later.

After a migration is complete, though, we often see customers start to implement IaC without the proper knowledge and processes in place. Maybe only a single person or a small team takes the lead on AWS cloud development, and skills aren’t spread across the organisation. This means that some departments might not see the benefits of infrastructure as code, with some still manually provisioning resources. And if a key member of the IaC team leaves the company, the whole modernisation initiative could suffer.

Another common problem is that a company might apply infrastructure as code to new environments, but continue to manually manage legacy systems. Or a business might fail to make code reusable across the organisation. Either way, the result is inefficiency that fails to optimise the use of IaC, which limits the benefits an organisation can experience.

These problems quickly become obvious to tech teams that understand the value of infrastructure as code but lack the staff, time or management support to do things correctly. That’s where SoftwareOne can step in and help turn things around.

How SoftwareOne helps with implementation of AWS resources

There’s a lot that SoftwareOne can do to help customers optimise their use of infrastructure as code. We usually start with some pre-built modules to get things moving quickly – not necessarily enough to get to 100% IaC right away, but maybe at least 60%. We normally begin by setting up a SoftwareOne Landing Zone on AWS that will provide proper foundations for future environments that follow best practices. From there, customers can start creating workloads on their own or we can provide support for that as part of the managed cloud services  we provide.

It’s important to understand first what your organisation wants to achieve with IaC and to assess existing levels of knowledge. SoftwareOne can usually establish a customer’s basic requirements within a few days – although more complex environments can take longer. We can also provide longer-term help with upskilling and documentation if needed.

Our goal is to make the management of your cloud resources as easy as pushing a button. By properly implementing infrastructure as code, customers discover they have full control over workloads, infrastructure changes, security and so much more. This not only improves efficiency and ease of innovation, but it can also lead to considerable cost savings. With just a small improvement to its cloud architecture, one customer we worked with was quickly able to save $1 million USD in infrastructure expenses.

How AWS supports infrastructure as code

Our goal is always to help an organisation transform to 100% infrastructure as code, eliminating manual management and automating as much as possible. We also try to minimise the toolset that is used to support this, relying primarily on AWS-native tools. The only exception is Terraform, a tool to help automate code infrastructure provisioning and management.

Among the AWS services we use are:

• AWS Code* services – used to build CI/CD pipelines and automate change management, these include AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeStar, AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeArtifact and AWS CodeDeploy
• AWS Organisations – used to manage multi-account strategy and centralise many activities to reduce operating expenses and improve security and compliance
• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) – used to manage access to AWS services
• AWS Security Hub – used to collect all security events in a central location
• AWS Config – used to track changes in the infrastructure
• Amazon GuardDuty – used for threat detection
• Amazon CloudWatch – used for storing logs and metrics and for building alarms on top of them
• AWS CloudTrail – used to collect logs for AWS service usage
• AWS Transit Gateway, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) – used to build observable networks
• Amazon Route 53 – used to provide DNS service in the cloud
  
  ... and many more that contribute to overall security, compliance and maintainability on AWS infrastructure

Depending on where an organisation is in its cloud transformation journey, we might also start by assessing its needs using the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP).