The creation of cloud infrastructures as code offers developers and system administrators the possibility, to create their cloud resources, to manage these, and to provide or update these in a transparent manner. Storm Reply creates replicable environments as program code for its customers and uses tools such as AWS CloudFormation, Terraform or Ansible configurations to secure the setup, modifications and versioning.
A leading German airline operates complex IT application environments on AWS. These environments were created with the help of the AWS console.
Since the AWS environments were created with the AWS console, it is currently difficult to replicate (e.g. to set up test or disaster recovery scenarios). An automated reconstruction or the creation of replicas as well as systematic versioning is almost impossible. This means the agility of the cloud cannot be completely be exploited. The implementation of changes takes longer than necessary since the code pipeline contains manual elements.
Storm Reply created a Terraform configuration that reflects the available AWS environment as program code. Terraform is a tool to setup, modify and version IT infrastructures – in the cloud as well as in your own computer center (for more information about Terraform see www.terraform.io). This makes Terraform platform independent and prevents a vendor lock-in – as with AWS Cloud Formation, for example. This image gives the customers the long-term possibility of recreating the production environment as needed in order to quickly generate temporary test environments, to create versions of the environments and to track changes. The objective of the project for the airline company was, together with Storm Reply, to create the Terraform configuration for the existing AWS infrastructure, to test this in the existing environment and to create an image of the environment. The configuration is built up modularly. In addition, a knowledge transfer from the team can be set up so that the further expansion and internal maintenance can take place at the customer.
As an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, Storm Reply offers its customers the best possible cloud solution even outside of AWS services thanks to in-depth expertise in the relevant products. Partnerships with manufacturers of security solutions, software analytics tools or co-location providers give Storm Reply the flexibility to operate cloud computing even beyond the AWS platform as efficiently as possible according to customer requirements.