"immutable infrastructure" entries
An introduction to immutable infrastructure
Why you should stop managing infrastructure and start really programming it.
Immutable infrastructure (II) provides stability, efficiency, and fidelity to your applications through automation and the use of successful patterns from programming. No rigorous or standardized definition of immutable infrastructure exists yet, but the basic idea is that you create and operate your infrastructure using the programming concept of immutability: once you instantiate something, you never change it. Instead, you replace it with another instance to make changes or ensure proper behavior.
Chad Fowler coined the term “immutable infrastructure” in a 2013 blog post, “Trash Your Servers and Burn Your Code: Immutable Infrastructure and Disposable Components,” but others have spoken about similar ideas. Martin Fowler described phoenix servers in 2012. Greg Orzell, James Carr, Kief Morris, and Ben Butler-Cole, to name a few, have contributed significant thought and work as well.
II requires full automation of your runtime environment. This is only possible in compute environments that have an API over all aspects of configuration and monitoring. Therefore, II can be fully realized only in true cloud environments. It is possible to realize some benefits of II with partial implementations, but the true benefits of efficiency and resiliency are realized with thorough implementation.