REL07-BP01 Use automation when obtaining or scaling resources - Reliability Pillar
Implementation guidanceResources

REL07-BP01 Use automation when obtaining or scaling resources

A cornerstone of reliability in the cloud is the programmatic definition, provisioning, and management of your infrastructure and resources. Automation helps you streamline resource provisioning, facilitate consistent and secure deployments, and scale resources across your entire infrastructure.

Desired outcome: You manage your infrastructure as code (IaC). You define and maintain your infrastructure code in version control systems (VCS). You delegate provisioning AWS resources to automated mechanisms and leverage managed services like Application Load Balancer (ALB), Network Load Balancer (NLB), and Auto Scaling groups. You provision your resources using continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines so that code changes automatically initiate resource updates, including updates to your Auto Scaling configurations.

Common anti-patterns:

  • You deploy resources manually using the command line or at the AWS Management Console (also known as click-ops).

  • You tightly couple your application components or resources, and create inflexible architectures as a result.

  • You implement inflexible scaling policies that do not adapt to changing business requirements, traffic patterns, or new resource types.

  • You manually estimate capacity to meet anticipated demand.

Benefits of establishing this best practice: Infrastructure as code (IaC) allows infrastructure to be defined programmatically. This helps you manage infrastructure changes through the same software development lifecycle as application changes, which promotes consistency and repeatability and reduces the risk of manual, error-prone tasks. You can further streamline the process of provisioning and updating resources through implementing IaC with automated delivery pipelines. You can deploy infrastructure updates reliably and efficiently without the need for manual intervention. This agility is particularly important when scaling resources to meet fluctuating demands.

You can achieve dynamic, automated resource scaling in conjunction with IaC and delivery pipelines. By monitoring key metrics and applying predefined scaling policies, Auto Scaling can automatically provision or deprovision resources as needed, which improves performance and cost-efficiency. This reduces the potential for manual errors or delays in response to changes in application or workload requirements.

The combination of IaC, automated delivery pipelines, and Auto Scaling helps organizations provision, update, and scale their environments with confidence. This automation is essential to maintain a responsive, resilient, and efficiently-managed cloud infrastructure.

Level of risk exposed if this best practice is not established: High

Implementation guidance

To set up automation with CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code (IaC) for your AWS architecture, choose a version control system such as Git to store your IaC templates and configuration. These templates can be written using tools such as AWS CloudFormation. To start, define your infrastructure components (such as AWS VPCs, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Groups, and Amazon RDS databases) within these templates.

Next, integrate these IaC templates with a CI/CD pipeline to automate the deployment process. AWS CodePipeline provides a seamless AWS-native solution, or you can use other third-party CI/CD solutions. Create a pipeline that activates when changes occur to your version control repository. Configure the pipeline to include stages that lint and validate your IaC templates, deploy the infrastructure to a staging environment, run automated tests, and finally, deploy to production. Incorporate approval steps where necessary to maintain control over changes. This automated pipeline not only speeds up deployment but also facilitates consistency and reliability across environments.

Configure Auto Scaling of resources such as Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon ECS tasks, and database replicas in your IaC to provide automatic scale-out and scale-in as needed. This approach enhances application availability and performance and optimizes cost by dynamically adjusting resources based on demand. For a list of supported resources, see Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling and AWS Auto Scaling.

Implementation steps

  1. Create and use a source code repository to store the code that controls your infrastructure configuration. Commit changes to this repository to reflect any ongoing changes you want to make.

  2. Select an infrastructure as code solution such as AWS CloudFormation to keep your infrastructure up to date and detect inconsistency (drift) from your intended state.

  3. Integrate your IaC platform with your CI/CD pipeline to automate deployments.

  4. Determine and collect the appropriate metrics for automatic scaling of resources.

  5. Configure automatic scaling of resources using scale-out and scale-in policies appropriate for your workload components. Consider using scheduled scaling for predictable usage patterns.

  6. Monitor deployments to detect failures and regressions. Implement rollback mechanisms within your CI/CD platform to revert changes if necessary.

Resources

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