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August 12, 2022

Cloud Provisioning: Tools + Tips to Start Automating Cloud Infrastructure Provisioning

Cloud
How to & Use Cases

Many organizations rely on cloud provisioning services for setting up and maintaining their infrastructure. Learn more about the many benefits of cloud provisioning and how you can leverage these benefits using Terraform and Bolt.

Table of Contents

  1. What is Cloud Provisioning?
  2. What are Cloud Provisioning Tools?
  3. Cloud Provisioning Tools Examples
  4. What is Provisioning in Cloud Computing?
  5. Benefits of Cloud Provisioning
  6. Cloud Provisioning Challenges
  7. Cloud Infrastructure Provisioning with Terraform
  8. Automate Configuration Management with Bolt
  9. Consolidate Cloud Provisioning Into a Workflow
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What is Cloud Provisioning?

Cloud provisioning is the act of allocating resources from a cloud provider (like Amazon AWS, Google, and Azure) to a customer. Cloud provisioning is an important aspect of the cloud computing model, which defines which resources a customer gets and how.

A cloud provisioning service that can provide essential resources for managing your infrastructure on demand is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

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What are Cloud Provisioning Tools?

Cloud provisioning tools refer to the software that assists all of the different tasks that cloud provisioning requires, including orchestration, automation, and provisioning. 

You might use a single cloud provisioning tool for backing up and storing data or making changes to settings. Or you might use different provisioning tools to handle different kinds of tasks in the cloud.

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The goal of any cloud provisioning tool is to support your cloud ops and meet your specific needs. That means just having a provisioning tool isn't enough; you need the knowledge and the skills to use the tool appropriately for your needs. 

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Cloud Provisioning Tools Examples

Cloud provisioning tools can manage a wide range of your cloud resources — such as compute, storage, network, and databases. They can also be used to automate deployment and configuration of applications in the cloud. Different tools handle different tasks. 

Some examples of cloud-specific provider tools include:

  • AWS CloudFormation
  • Azure Resource Manager 
  • Google Cloud Deployment Manager
  • IBM Cloud Orchestrator

Third-party tools that work across different cloud providers, even across hybrid cloud environments, include tools like:

Cloud security tools also come in first- and third-party options. Read more about the differences between them, and how they can both be used to ensure consistency when provisioning cloud infrastructure, in our blog about cloud-native security tools >>

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What is Provisioning in Cloud Computing?

Provisioning is the process of creating and configuring the hardware and software resources needed to run cloud applications and services. This includes both the underlying infrastructure, such as networking and storage, as well as the applications and services themselves.

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Benefits of Cloud Provisioning

Cloud provisioning offers many benefits to an organization, including greater efficiency and scalability, faster deployments, and cost savings.

One of the best things about cloud computing is how it converts technical efficiencies into cost savings. Some of those efficiencies are just part of the tool kit, like pay-per-use Lambda jobs.

Good DevOps brings a lot of savings to the cloud, as well. It can smooth out high-friction state management challenges. Provisioning cloud services, for example, speed up deployments. That’s where treating infrastructure the same as workflows from the rest of your codebase comes in.

☁️ The hybrid cloud is scalable, more secure, and here to stay. Don't skip these key resources around the hybrid cloud >>

Treating infrastructure as code opens the doors to tons of optimization opportunities. One standout approach is standardization, which can simplify operational challenges. When you deploy from a configuration document, you decrease risk and speed up development. You also can employ those configuration files in automated DevOps workflows. In this post, we’ll give some examples of how you can leverage these benefits using Terraform for deploying cloud resources and Bolt for configuring them.

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Cloud Provisioning Challenges

Today, the "cloud" doesn't just mean "a cloud." The cloud can refer to hybrid cloud environments in many different combinations that store and manage infrastructure. Working across a hybrid cloud environment also makes it more difficult to enforce configurations that enable repeat provisioning — adding manual work and time to the process. 

You might run into provisioning cloud challenges like:

  • Managing compliance across the hybrid cloud, and ultimately supporting your security.
  • Scaling to meet the changing size and needs of your organization.
  • Enforcing consistencyso that everyone on your team is working from the same playbook and has the appropriate level of access across the org. 

This is where Infrastructure as Code (IaC) supports your goals — it eliminates manual work across the hybrid cloud and automatically enforces code that works across everything, all of the time. 

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Cloud Infrastructure Provisioning with Terraform

Terraform is a cloud provisioning tool from HashiCorp that can be used to automate cloud infrastructure and facilitate multi-cloud deployments.

Terraform is great for building and destroying temporary resources. It can simplify an ad-hoc data processing workflow, for example.

Let’s say you’re doing on-demand data processing in AWS. You need to spin up an EMR cluster, transform your data, and destroy the cluster immediately. This transient cluster workflow pattern saves you a ton. But manually deploying the cluster for each job slows down development time. With Terraform, you can write that cluster’s specifications once and check it into git to ensure you deploy the same version each time.

Terraform configurations are incredibly easy to write and read. They can also be easily modularized for reuse. Rather than plugging all of the configurations into one file, templatize the resource and the value for each argument from a tfvars file, which acts as a config.

Here is a truncated example of a templatized EMR resource that you might put in your main file.

resource "aws_emr_cluster" "cluster" {
  # required args:
  name                      = "${var.name}"
  release_label             = "${var.release_label}"
  applications              = "${var.applications}"
  service_role              = "${var.service_role}"
  master_instance_group {
    instance_type           = "${var.master_instance_type}"
  }
  core_instance_group {
    instance_type           = "${var.core_instance_type}"
    instance_count          = "${var.core_instance_count}"
  }
}

The vars are referenced from a terraform.tfvars file that inherits variable declarations from a variables.tf file.

terraform.tfvars:

name                        = "spark-app"
release_label               = "emr-5.30.0"
applications                = ["Hadoop", "Spark"]
master_instance_type        = "m3.xlarge"
core_instance_type          = "m3.xlarge"
core_instance_count         = 1

variables.tf:

variable "name" {}
variable "release_label" {}
variable "applications" {
  type = "list"
}
variable "master_instance_type" {}
variable "core_instance_type" {}
variable "core_instance_count" {}

Notice how easy it is to modify an instance type. They’re all well-documented and centrally managed in the code. No one has to look up a Wiki or previous version of the application. Just check it out of git and refer to a single, deployable config. Note that this is an incomplete list of arguments. For a full list of optional and required arguments, see Terraform's aws_emr_clusterdocumentation.

Furthermore, by storing your Terraform repo in git, you can leverage event-driven automation workflows, such as redeploying the resource on merges into your primary branch.

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Automate Configuration Management with Bolt

Bolt is an open source tool from Puppet that automates and orchestrates tasks to simplify workflows for the long term. When combined with Terraform, it's an essential tool in your cloud provisioning toolbox.

Now let’s look at how to conveniently update persistent infrastructure such as a fleet of always-on EC2 instances. Applying new cloud provisioning actions to each one can be time-consuming.

Bolt by Puppet helps you manage multiple remote resources at once. You can use it to perform scheduled uptime monitoring, or you can run one-off patching tasks. In either case, Bolt tools can be captured within your projects and maintained in git. That allows you to apply the benefits of infrastructure as code to your configuration and maintenance programs.

Bolt actions are either tasks or plans. Tasks are on-demand actions. Plans are orchestration scripts. Let’s start with a simple task. Suppose your development team needs a Docker engine installed on a suite of EC2 instances. It would look like this:

bolt task run package action=install name=docker --targets my-ec2-fleet

The installation will be applied to all of the resources declared as targets in the projects inventory file.

Plans are declarative workflows written in YAML that run one or more tasks. That makes them easy to read and modify. A simple plan to provision newly deployed web servers with nginx would look like this:

parameters:
  targets:
    type: TargetSpec
steps:
  - resources:
    - package: nginx
      parameters:
        ensure: latest
    - type: service
      title: nginx
      parameters:
        ensure: running
    targets: $targets
    description: "Set up nginx on the web servers"

Notice that targets is parameterized. That allows you to dynamically apply a list of resources when the plan is executed. You can leverage that further by integrating Bolt with other DevOps workflows.

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Consolidate Cloud Provisioning Into a Workflow

Now we’ve covered cloud provisioning with Terraform and Bolt. Both are great tools that help you standardize infrastructure and configuration processes as code. You can even string them together in a modular event-driven workflow to reliably reuse and modify.

Explore all the ways Puppet tools can help to streamline your cloud provisioning workflow with a free trial of Puppet Enterprise today!

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