As easy as it is to change configuration in User Interfaces maintaining this over a long time becomes a hassle. This is especially true if you are looking after configuration for multiple environments and applications. In this article, we look at a new Terraform provider for AppDynamics to get around this issue using configuration as code.
Why Configuration as Code
The ‘as code’ practice has been thrown around a lot recently. You may recognise it in infrastructure as code which is often used to build applications on AWS. Ther are various tools used for this such as Terraform, CDK, CloudFormation and Puppet to name a few. We will be using Terraform later on, an introduction to this can be found here.
The alternative to this practice is to manually create and change things. This could be running commands on servers or changing things in user interfaces (UIs). This makes reproducing things hard as you have to remember and manually apply the changes.
By defining our config as code we get the benefit of being able to reuse it. If we apply good programming techniques we can modularise it and use it in many places. Some examples of this are using the same configuration in pre-production and production environments and sharing common configuration between similar applications.
#devops #appdynamics #terraform #apm
