How IfC Complements IaC

Listen in as Nitric co-founder Jye Cusch describes how Nitric can be used alongside Terraform. Offering Infrastructure from Code (IfC), Nitric enhances Terraform's Infrastructure as Code (IaC) by streamlining work across developer and operations teams.

Video Transcript

You can think of Nitric as an API that helps facilitate communication between the developer teams and what they want their application architecture to look like, and turning that automatically into the Terraform modules that you have already built, have already had approved, that are always secure, that sort of thing.

Application developers are still free to design the application architecture, which includes in general terms, the infrastructure they want.

I want a queue. I want messaging. I want persistence and I want compute. That's all in Nitric terminology at the application level, but now the Ops team have the full flexibility to decide how that actually gets realized as concrete resources in the cloud that they support, like Google.

The Ops team can see, Oh, these are tools I'm familiar with and how to use them. They have a suite of Terraform modules, which are pre-baked ways to deploy different infrastructure elements.

But we can accelerate the delivery. We generate a resource graph. So all of the infrastructure resources that are required and the interactions between them, and then we hand that over to what we call a provider, and the code loops through. Okay, we need queues. So for each queue, we call and implement an instance of this Terraform module that gives us a queue.

Typically Nitric would just deploy your application all the way through to the cloud and have it running. But in this demo, what we actually do is we use Nitric more as an infrastructure compiler. It takes your application, Nitric runs over it, and out comes a Terraform project full of HCL that uses existing Terraform modules. But it doesn't actually do the deployment. You still use Terraform for that.

But the nice thing about that is it means their existing deployment and automation pipelines that do security and vulnerability assessment or price assessment, all of those things can still work like normal because it's just a normal Terraform project that gets pushed out the other side.

Read more about IfC enhancing IaC, and let us know if you’re interested in seeing a demo of our Nitric Terraform provider. Come chat with us anytime in Discord.