Talk presented at the Java Dominicano Monthly Talks — October 2024

The Importance of Automation

In this edition of the Java Dominicano Monthly Talks, we revisited the concept of IaC for everyone. The premise is simple: infrastructure as code is not exclusive to Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) or DevOps experts; it is an essential skill for every modern software developer.

Why should you use IaC?

  • Deployment Speed: Go from taking hours to having an environment ready in seconds.
  • Living Documentation: Your infrastructure is the code, not an outdated document.
  • Consistency: Eliminate the “it works on my machine” problem at the infrastructure level as well.

The Ecosystem Tools

During the session, we compared three different approaches to managing cloud resources (using DigitalOcean as an example):

1. The CLI Approach (doctl)

Ideal for quick scripts and ad-hoc tasks. It is the easiest entry point to interact with a provider’s API.

2. The Declarative Approach (OpenTofu)

Using human-readable configuration files, we define the desired state of our infrastructure. OpenTofu takes care of calculating the difference and applying the necessary changes.

3. The Programmatic Approach (Pulumi)

For Java developers, Pulumi offers a familiar experience by allowing infrastructure to be defined using the Java SDK. This enables the use of loops, conditionals, and abstractions native to the language.

Configuration and Demo

The final demo showed how to orchestrate the creation of a complete web infrastructure and its subsequent automatic configuration.

  1. Provisioning: Creation of Droplets and a Load Balancer.
  2. Configuration: Installing Nginx and databases using Ansible.
# Example of executing the complete workflow
opentofu apply -auto-approve
ansible-playbook -i inventory.ini setup-site.yml

Conclusion

The main message for the Java Dominicano community was: Start small. You don’t need to automate your entire company’s infrastructure today. Start by automating the creation of a local database server or a testing environment, and you will soon see the benefits of having your infrastructure under version control.

Resources