The role of infrastructure as code in edge datacentre computing
Summary
According to Chris Astley, a partner and head of engineering at KPMG UK, in a cloud context, IaC is the clear choice for automation and is also making inroads into private datacentres. He says: “The positive effect of this is the removal of possible human error when any changes to infrastructure are made, drastically reducing the potential for the opening of a new exploitable vulnerability for threat actors to take advantage of. It is also possible to view all code misconfigurations in one place and therefore faster to manage and remediate them.” Astley also points out that the automation offered by IaC gives IT operations teams a way to deploy updates from cloud providers instantly. Also, Astley believes IaC provides a way for teams to build up an understanding of common vulnerabilities and having a documented response and improvement process to address weaknesses discovered during the threat assessment audits. Being able to restore to a known working state in minutes is critical to fast recovery from that scenario.” John Davis, distinguished engineer at Kyndryl, believes DevSecOps has encouraged developers to become more familiar with infrastructure and operations to be more application-aligned.