What is declarative infrastructure?

In declarative infrastructure, we describe the final state of an infrastructure system, and the system makes the adjustments required to reach that state. It is a concept commonly associated with infrastructure as code (IaC) techniques.

Key characteristics

The key characteristic of declarative infrastructure is that it allows developers to define the desired end-state of the final configuration without specifying how to get there. Developers only have to determine the name and attributes of the infrastructure resources they want to provide, and the IaC tool will take care of the rest. Declarative architecture is excellent for automating and coordinating DevOps infrastructure since it is repeatable and adaptive.

Benefits

Declarative infrastructure provides several benefits, including:

• Idempotency: With a declarative approach, you can repeatedly apply the same configuration without causing conflicts or unexpected side effects.

• Version control and reproducibility: Infrastructure configurations can be stored in version control systems, allowing you to track changes over time, collaborate with others, and easily reproduce infrastructure setups.

• Better scalability: Declarative infrastructure is designed to be scalable, providing infrastructure resources across multiple environments and regions.

• Improved security: Declarative infrastructure can supply highly secure and compliant infrastructure resources since it is built to be secure.

• Self-healing and fault tolerance: The infrastructure system can identify and fix configuration drift, mistakes, or failures because it continually monitors the desired state and makes modifications. As a result, systems become more robust and fault-tolerant.

Terraform, Puppet, Ansible, Salt, and CloudFormation are a few examples of well-known IaC tools that use the declarative programming model.

Examples and use cases

Some examples and use cases of declarative infrastructure include:

• Provisioning cloud resources: Declarative infrastructure can be used to provision cloud resources such as virtual machines, storage, and networking.

• Automating DevOps infrastructure: Declarative infrastructure can be used to automate DevOps infrastructure, such as continuous integration and delivery pipelines, testing environments, and monitoring systems.

• Managing configuration: Declarative infrastructure can manage configuration across multiple environments and regions, ensuring consistency and reliability.