Day 1: The Old Way - Challenges of the Traditional Approach

We’ve celebrated the virtues of Infrastructure as Code. To drive the point home, let’s spend some more time dissecting the “old way.” Understanding the specific, tangible problems of the traditional, manual approach to infrastructure management will give you a deeper appreciation for the solutions Terraform provides.

This was the world of “ClickOps,” where infrastructure was more art than science, and every server had its own unique personality.

The Anatomy of a “Snowflake” Server

In the days of manual configuration, no two servers were exactly alike. Each one was a unique “snowflake,” a product of its own manual creation and modification history.

Scenario: The Un-reproducible Bug

A bug is reported in your application, but it only occurs in the production environment. The developers can’t reproduce it in staging. The team spends days comparing the two environments, line by line, configuration by configuration.

Finally, they discover the culprit: the production server has a slightly different version of a system library that was updated manually during a late-night patching session months ago. This “snowflake” configuration is the root cause of the bug.

This problem was rampant in the pre-IaC era. Environments would drift apart over time, making it impossible to guarantee consistency and leading to countless hours of wasted effort.

+--------------------+      +--------------------+      +--------------------+
|   Dev Environment  |      | Staging Environment|      |  Prod Environment  |
+--------------------+      +--------------------+      +--------------------+
|                    |      |                    |      |                    |
|  - Lib version 1.1 |      |  - Lib version 1.2 |      |  - Lib version 1.2a|
|  - Manual patch A  |      |  - Manual patch B  |      |  - Manual patch C  |
|  - Config tweak X  |      |  - Config tweak Y  |      |  - Config tweak Z  |
|                    |      |                    |      |                    |
| (Works here)       |      | (Works here)       |      | (Fails here!)      |
+--------------------+      +--------------------+      +--------------------+

The “Bus Factor” and Tribal Knowledge

The “bus factor” is a morbid but effective way of measuring the risk of relying on a single person. How many people on your team would need to be hit by a bus for your project to grind to a halt?

In the world of manual infrastructure management, the bus factor was often dangerously low.

Scenario: The Single Point of Failure

Only one person on your team, let’s call her “The Guru,” knows how to provision and configure the company’s complex, multi-tiered application environment. She built it from scratch, and the documentation is either non-existent or hopelessly out of date.

The Guru goes on a two-week vacation, and of course, that’s when a critical server fails. The rest of the team is paralyzed. They don’t know how to rebuild the server, and they’re afraid to touch anything for fear of breaking something else.

This is the problem of tribal knowledge. When infrastructure is managed manually, the knowledge of how it works lives in the heads of a few key people. This is a massive risk to the business.

IaC solves this problem by codifying that knowledge. The Terraform code becomes the single source of truth, accessible to everyone on the team.

The Fallacy of “Security by Obscurity”

In some traditional environments, there was a mistaken belief that making the infrastructure complex and poorly documented was a form of “security by obscurity.” The thinking was that if no one knew how it worked, it would be harder for attackers to compromise.

This is a dangerous fallacy. Attackers are often more adept at discovering the intricacies of your environment than your own team is.

Scenario: The Hidden Vulnerability

A server was manually configured years ago with a public-facing management port that was supposed to be temporary. The person who configured it left the company, and the knowledge of that open port was lost.

Years later, an attacker running a simple port scan discovers the vulnerability and uses it to gain access to your network.

IaC promotes security by design. Security policies are codified and version-controlled. Every change is reviewed and audited. There are no hidden backdoors or forgotten vulnerabilities.

The High Cost of Manual Labor

Finally, let’s not forget the most straightforward problem with the traditional approach: it’s incredibly expensive.

• Time is Money: The hours spent manually clicking, configuring, and troubleshooting are hours that could be spent on innovation and value-added work.
• Cost of Errors: A single misconfiguration can lead to costly outages, data breaches, and reputational damage.
• Scaling Costs: As your infrastructure grows, the cost and complexity of manual management grow exponentially. You have to hire more people just to keep the lights on.

The traditional approach to infrastructure management was a product of its time. But in the modern era of cloud computing, microservices, and continuous delivery, it is no longer viable. The challenges we’ve discussed are not just inconveniences; they are significant business risks.

This is why the industry has so enthusiastically embraced Infrastructure as Code. It’s not just a better way to manage infrastructure; it’s the only way to manage infrastructure at scale in the 21st century.