Recently a number of customers have been coming to Dell EMC asking for us to help them with Infrastructure as Code solutions that will allow them to use DevOps methodologies such as CI/CD to provision to multi-cloud environments such as Azure,AWS,Google Cloud and on-premises solutions. These kinds of solutions are becoming more and more prevalent in my experience and although they don’t fit for all companies the capabilities of IaC are undeniable and will allow many companies to stay relevant and allow them to go to market much quicker and in a much more automated manner.

So alike to a lot of resources I post on this blog I started collating all the learning resources I could so that I could learn all about the possibilities of IaC and the various methods it could be accomplished. I have built the below list and will be adding to it over time. Also do keep an eye out on the vBrownbag as we plan to do many more IaC sessions very soon

• The first place I started was to read this book to understand IaC better. This book was really good and was so easy to read that the Client Solutions Director I was working on an RFP response with for a customer read half of it and found it extremely helpful for him to understand IaC from a sales perspective and gave him the ability to talk to it confidently
• Next was a blog posting by a fellow vBrownbag (and the OG of the vBB crew who created vBrownbag) Cody Bunch all about using Terraform with vSphere.
• Talking of using Terraform, Colin Westwater did a session for the vBrownbag podcast late last year all about using Terraform with vSphere.
• Colin has also done a brilliant blog series all about Terraform with vSphere.
• Yet another vBrownbag done by a good friend of mine Lior Kamrat gave a great introduction to IaC  using Packer and Terraform.
• Everyone seems to love Terraform for IaC at present as there is even a really good course by Nick Colyer all about using Terraform but this time for AWS and vSphere.
• Speaking about AWS there are case studies and whitepapers I read about capabilities of IaC with AWS that were really helpful in my understanding. There is also a really good Cloud Academy lab you can do to learn some of the CloudFormation pieces here.
• Steve Tegeler and Nathan Ness did a session at OpenStack Australia in 2016 around Infrastructure as Code 101
• Last on my list at present is Grant Orchard covering the usage of Terraform with vRealize Automation. I know Grant recently did a session around this topic at the Danish VMUG so hopefully a session with the vBrownbag can be organised so everyone can learn from him.

If you know of any more resources, then please do let me know.

Gregg