- A/B Testing
- Agile
- Automation
- Blue/Green Deployment
- Build
- Canary Release
- Chaos Engineering
- CI/CD
- Cloud-Native
- Code Review
- Configuration Management
- Container
- Continuous Testing
- DevOps Culture
- Docker
- Environment
- Feedback Loop
- Idempotence
- Immutable Infrastructure
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
- Infrastructure Monitoring
- Jenkins
- Kubernetes
- Microservices
- Monitoring
- Pipeline
- Post-Mortem Analysis
- Provisioning
- Release
- Repository (Repo)
- Rollback
- Scalability
- Shift Left
- Smoke Testing
- Source Code Management (SCM)
- Vagrant
- Version Control
- Virtual Machine
Immutable Infrastructure is an approach where infrastructure entities, like VMs, containers, and configurations, are never modified after deployment. Any change requires the redeployment of a new instance, ensuring consistency, repeatability, and traceability. Immutable Infrastructure aligns with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and continuous delivery practices, leveraging tools like Terraform, Docker, and Kubernetes, enhancing stability, security, and agility in modern IT landscapes.
Use Cases
Blue-Green Deployments
- Objective: To minimize downtime during software releases.
- Scope: Utilize immutable infrastructure to create a parallel (green) environment to the existing production (blue) one. Switch traffic only when the new environment is verified.
- Advantage: Ensures zero-downtime deployments and facilitates easy rollback in case of issues, improving availability and user experience.
Auto-Scaling
- Objective: To dynamically adjust infrastructure based on demand.
- Scope: Implement immutable instances that can be automatically spawned or decommissioned based on pre-set metrics like CPU usage or incoming traffic.
- Advantage: Enables efficient resource utilization and ensures consistent application performance during demand spikes or lulls.
Disaster Recovery
- Objective: To ensure rapid and reliable recovery of services in the event of system failure or data loss.
- Scope: Utilize immutable infrastructure snapshots to restore systems to a known good state.
- Advantage: Provides quick recovery with guaranteed consistency, minimizing business disruption and data loss.
Compliance and Auditing
- Objective: To maintain an auditable history of infrastructure states for compliance purposes.
- Scope: Every change to the infrastructure is recorded as a new immutable version, traceable and auditable.
- Advantage: Simplifies the compliance auditing process and ensures that the system adheres to defined policies and regulations at all times.
Security Patching
- Objective: To apply security updates without affecting running services.
- Scope: Deploy new immutable instances with the necessary patches while phasing out the older, vulnerable ones.
- Advantage: Ensures that all instances are secure, reduces the attack surface, and avoids the risk of “configuration drift,” where manual changes could introduce vulnerabilities.