Deploy atomic infrastructure components

Cloud infrastructure can be large and complex. You should deploy small updates to your infrastructure on a frequent cadence. Small and frequent deployments lower the risk of bad deployments and increase the ability to roll back changes.

You can deploy infrastructure more frequently when you couple them with CI/CD pipelines. These pipelines increase the speed and reliability of your deployments, allowing you to ship updates to your services faster.

Understanding the changes Terraform will apply to your infrastructure before you execute them is important. Terraform lets you preview changes with the plan command so you can understand the effects of your modifications on your infrastructure prior to deploying them. Many popular CI/CD products integrate with Terraform, allowing you to manage your infrastructure effectively.

HashiCorp resources:

• Learn how to automate Terraform with GitHub Actions
• Terraform plan

External resources:

• Infrastructure as Code with Terraform and GitLab

Next steps

In this section of Deploy with confidence, you learned how to implement atomic deployments for infrastructure by deploying small, frequent updates to reduce risk and enable faster rollback capabilities. Atomic deployments is part of the Define and automate processes pillar.

Refer to the following documents to learn more about deployment strategies:

• Zero-downtime deployments to implement zero-downtime deployment strategies
• Automate deployments to automate your deployment processes
• Automation maturity model to understand your current automation level