The Big Idea

One key goal as a CTO is to build an infrastructure that is reproducible, resilient, and scales effectively as the needs of the company grow. We consider this one of the most important aspects for the CTO to oversee and understand. Not comprehending how the infrastructure works can lead to:

• Horizontal Spending. If you’re not going to understand how the infrastructure works, you’re going to throw money at the problem. Increasing size, pool or power to your systems so that it will process data faster or compute quicker will get very expensive very quickly.
• Hiring Madness. Knowing what functions to hire for gets very tricky when you don’t understand the complexities you should be hiring for. In an era where cloud providers are offering certifications and credits as an incentive to gain market share, it can be a jungle out there.
• Help Fatigue. At some point you’ll get caught in a no win situation and have to bring in outside help. Consultants will be all too happy to help but probably charge you a premium. The other danger is that each consultant might bring with them a different modality from which they believe your infrastructure should be set up.

One can never start too soon. Even in the app or service’s infancy, think about how the code goes from development to production. The particular challenge with infrastructure in this day and age is that it is rapidly evolving and improving. In some cases what works today won’t be considered best practice a year from now.

We want our infrastructure to be secure and scalable. The best way to do this is by creating scripts that stand up your infrastructure and updates it accordingly.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a method of managing and provisioning computing resources, network configurations, and other IT infrastructure through machine-readable files, rather than manual hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools. Essentially, IaC treats infrastructure setup procedures in the same manner as any other code: these scripts can be version-controlled, shared, and automated, creating a systematic, repeatable process for managing infrastructure.

One of the primary benefits of IaC is consistency. By defining infrastructure as code, teams can eliminate manual configuration and ensure that the infrastructure setup is the same every time it's deployed. This reduces the possibility of errors and inconsistencies that can occur due to manual intervention, and it helps ensure that the application behaves the same way across different environments—development, testing, staging, and production. The result is a much more reliable, predictable, and immutable deployment process.

IaC also brings scalability and speed to the table. As the code defines the infrastructure, setting up new servers or databases doesn't involve manual effort but merely running the scripts. This means that scaling up to meet increased demand, or setting up parallel environments for testing or redundancy, becomes much quicker and easier. Infrastructure can be spun up or down in a matter of minutes, not hours or days.

Moreover, IaC is crucial for disaster recovery. In the event of a catastrophic failure, teams can rebuild the entire infrastructure swiftly by rerunning the scripts. This can significantly reduce downtime and ensure business continuity.

In summary, Infrastructure as Code is a crucial aspect of a well-run engineering team, offering benefits in terms of consistency, scalability, speed, and disaster recovery. By leveraging IaC, teams can improve efficiency, reduce manual errors, and ensure that their infrastructure is robust, reliable, and quickly recoverable in case of a disaster.

When an infrastructure is immutable, it has been coded, the code is version controlled, and the infrastructure has been fully tested (just like our products area) This makes them more:

• Resilient. Sometimes the environment in which an app is running feels volatile. Like a house of cards. Like a padlock that only one person knows how to open. When your infrastructure is coded in scripts that can be run by anyone, it feels resilient. It can’t be kept down. Secrets aren’t lost when something breaks.
• Reproducible. When the setup is coded, it can be run from scratch. Again and again. Small tweaks can be made to configurations via scripts that can be read by other developers. It is a constant source of documentation for those who will follow.
• Rollbacks. Of course when catastrophes arise due to the deployment of an updated script, it can be rolled back to a previous state that did work. No more frantic pointing and clicking to get systems responsive again.

Infrastructure Security

Securing your infrastructure is a crucial aspect of a CTO's role, given the increasing prevalence of cloud computing and the associated security challenges. Cybersecurity will increasingly become a concern as your company grows and it starts with your infrastructure. We will address this more in Level 6 Security however here are some key points that a CTO needs to be aware of now: