Meet InfraRapid: Infrastructure as Code at Your Fingertips
Hi everyone!
My name is Raphael Socher and I am the founder of InfraCode! Welcome to what I hope will be the beginning of, as our mission statement says, an organization with the goal of enabling virtualization for every organization through code and community.
To reach our goals, we’re starting out building Infrastructure as Code tools on top of Hashicorp’s open source technology to make virtualization in the brave, new cloud-first world easier. The reasons we decided to start with Hashicorp are multifaceted.
HashiCorp is a pioneer in DevOps and Infrastructure as Code
First, they are a pioneer in a space I am deeply passionate about, DevOps. DevOps and its ilk have produced the capabilities that make a project like this possible today. The ability for developers to rapidly implement, test, and roll code into production has created dramatic process improvement in enterprise software development. Whereas 10 years ago, enterprise software development used to be a 2–3-year development cycle, the life cycle of development has been shortened to 6 months — in no small part due to the tooling in DevOps and its implication for the high-tech industry. Improvements in DevOps are high impact and go beyond Infrastructure as Code; they have cascading effects on every technology solution in the world and allow great, societally pivotal technology products and services to come to market faster in a more resilient manner, if executed well.
HashiCorp’s Terraform ‘boom’ was 10 years in the making (due to its strong execution)
Second, HashiCorp is complete in its vision, its execution is immaculate, and the problem it solves reduces friction in an inexhaustible manner. Building our stack on top of HashiCorp is our vote of confidence in their organizational prowess and ability to continue executing. They have proven over multiple iterative cycles to continue exceeding its user expectations, and the “sudden boom” in HashiCorp’s Terraform was 10 years in the making. What they have created from a vision perspective is a toolkit that will allow cloud-agnostic paradigms and a common language of what these cloud architectures look like. While this may seem minor, in the future, different processes will be better provisioned to certain clouds and having a way to articulate where and how to provision resources provides a utility not found in other infrastructure tools of today.
The nearest competitor to a HashiCorp, if you were to search for one, would be AWS CloudFormation, but unfortunately, that is an AWS proprietary tool. Only HashiCorp purports no victor in the race to cloud, and that’s because in a cloud-first world, we are all winners. For whatever application is developed, we will be able to optimize a cloud configuration that is best for your specific organizational needs.
HashiCorp’s current iteration has limitations. As is, HashiCorp is a heavyweight tool that requires not only specialization in specific cloud providers but also the ability to code in their proprietary language, HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language). For organizations truly at digital scale, HCL implementations with custom code may be the only option. However, for small and medium-sized organizations, HCL is a heavy lift to incorporate as of today. We want to ameliorate this issue as much as possible.
We’re creating Infrastructure as Code tools around HashiCorp for small/medium development teams
Over the next several months and years, we hope to develop robust Infrastructure as Code tooling around HashiCorp to enable your small and medium development shops that want to utilize cutting edge technology and gain all the advantages of what is truly a best in breed Infrastructure as Code tool, HashiCorp’s Terraform, and democratize and empower your organization. Infrastructure as Code is hard and having proper developer operations processes in place to implement the tooling is even harder.
As I write this, I am an active member of communities around Terraform, being a huge believer in the product. When people come and ask simple questions as they seek to understand Terraform, they are pointed to HashiCorp’s vast documentation library as if that is an answer to their problems. But, tackling the documentation of a massive project like HashiCorp and seeking to gain a holistic understanding of their Infrastructure as Code solution totally negates the purpose and ease of use that it is supposed to bring to cloud implementation.
InfraCode’s reactive CLI is making Terraform easier to use
With that, I’d like to present to you our first, open-source solution to making Terraform easier to use, and empowering you, the developers and DevOps engineers of the world, with easier access to what I firmly believe is the best Infrastructure as Code tool on earth.
Our reactive CLI is a tool scripted in Python with underlying modules constructed in Terraform that allows any user able to peruse our (if we did it right) substantially simplified documentation to implement most cloud infrastructure as needed. While we think gruntwork.io has done a good job of providing Terraform templates for your specific business needs (at a cost), we believe what our tool is doing is more powerful (and free). No longer do you have to search a code library for the exact specifications or patterns you are looking for in order to execute your specific project. Instead, use the canonically familiar CLI to output a custom HCL file at your fingertips to your exact specifications.
I want to let you know now though, this is most definitely just a beginning, not an end goal. While we will always continue to support the functionality in our free CLI, we want to enable our community to have the most modernized Infrastructure as Code tooling we can create. It is a core belief that for our users to be able to do their jobs to the best of their ability, we must provide them the highest power tools available. We are committed to the execution of our vision outlined above, with an aspiration of perfection.
We are centrally focused on community to achieve our goals in the spirit of open-source, as we believe that only through collaboration of the stakeholders (that is everyone even tangentially involved with this project) can we achieve optimal outcomes. We really hope to create something special here, with your help.
I hope you will join us on this journey.
