ᐈ Mutable vs Immutable infra made simple with ITSyndicate

Mutable and immutable are the two core paradigms for maintaining environments in cloud infrastructure. A great variety of specific advantages and drawbacks are related to each of the approaches, thus, rendering them applicable to different use cases, especially in cases where minimal downtime is to be achieved, the infrastructure is supposed to be well-manageable and compatible with legacy systems. This model is supported by tools such as Terraform, thereby making it flexible enough to support both need for mutable and immutable infrastructure; resources can either be updated in place or consistency can be achieved during deployment.

We will discuss with examples the basic differences between mutable and immutable infrastructure, how each model affects the management of infrastructure, and how Terraform can be used to arrive at the desired setup.

Understanding Mutable infrastructure

Mutable infrastructure is the one that can be modified or updated without complete teardown or redeployment. In the mutable model, resources are adjusted incrementally, and this is often favorable when service continuity is required or in the case of legacy systems. Mutable infrastructure was popular in traditional on-premises data centers and still plays an important role in today’s cloud environments, especially for more flexible systems.

Pros of Mutable infrastructure

Ease in upgrading resources: the biggest advantage of mutable infrastructure includes easy upgradation of resources at a place. Changes to the configuration or code can be applied directly to the environment, which is particularly useful for live systems where uptime is critical.
Support for legacy systems: many legacy systems were designed based on mutable principles, thus making this particular model supportive of on-premises data centers or older applications. Updating in place can preserve service continuity without imposing a complete overhaul or redevelopment to fit an immutable approach.
Minimal downtime with incremental updates: with tools like Terraform, mutable infrastructure supports in-place updates (terraform update in place), allowing changes to be effected with minimal downtime. This matters much in sectors where even one minute’s disruption could translate into substantial losses, for instance, in finance, e-commerce, and healthcare.

Cons of Mutable infrastructure

Configuration drift: a major shortcoming of mutable infrastructure is the risk of configuration drift, wherein environments start to diverge from the configurations that were intended for them in due course. Drift may begin because numerous small changes over time lead to inconsistencies that are impossible to keep track of and troubleshoot.
Challenges in maintaining: as time goes on, mutable environments would have been harder to manage simply because any small added update brings along with it dependencies and inconsistencies that would work properly only with close monitoring.

Examples of Mutable infrastructure in practice

A common use of mutable infrastructure is in those environments where system correctness is not that much important as compared to system availability. Following are some examples:

Legacy applications: old applications that were never built considering immutable tenets, and hence not easily configurable for complete reinstallation with each and every change.
Database management: systems where data persistence is of utmost significance and the cost involved in building a new database instance for each change is just too costly.

Understanding Immutable infrastructure

While the traditional infrastructure paradigm believes that organizations have invested much in dynamic resources that should be continuously updated, immutable infrastructure believes that once deployed, resources should not be changed. Unlike traditional approaches, which advocate incrementally updating running resources, the immutable model advocates whole reprovisioning of the environment so that migrations are more of a cutover instead of a gradual process. Immutable infrastructure is an approach that was brought to the fore by cloud-native applications and containerized application distribution. It is desirable because of the diminishing feature of configuration drift, and ease in troubleshooting since it ensures a clear, unchanging deployment state.

Pros of Immutable infrastructure

Consistency and predictability: as every release completely builds up the environment afresh from the start, it would ensure that all instances are consistent since no post-deployment configuration drift would have crept in; hence, each deployment exactly matches the intended configuration. This improves predictability and makes it simple to replicate an environment in any other cloud region or data center.
Enhanced security and compliance: immutable infrastructure enhances security by ensuring that every instance is based on secure, verified base images, minimizing the chance of unauthorized tampering. It makes it equally simple to ensure compliance since each deployment is the same and can be audited in a much easier manner.
Automation and standardization: automation features of infrastructure provisioning tools (Terraform), maintaining partly immutable infrastructure too, will contribute to making sure the deployments are identical all over. This level of standardization reduces the chances for human error; infrastructure is coded and maintains a certain pattern.

Cons of Immutable infrastructure

Higher resource consumption and potential downtime: higher resource consumption is inevitable concerning time and cost with the redeployment of full immutable infrastructure after every update. Potential downtime can increase during redeployment; however, blue-green or canary deployments will mitigate this to some degree.
Complexity with stateful applications: one of the management challenges with stateful applications in an immutable model is the management of applications that necessitate data persistence or stateful connections such as a database that cannot be quickly managed in an immutable model since every update would require data migration, which could complicate deployment pipelines and possibly cause some downtime.

Examples of Immutable infrastructure in practice

Immutable infrastructure is an ideal companion for cloud-native applications and containerized environments in general. There are the following examples:

Automated testing environments: test environments, which so often need an explicitly known state, will surely take advantage of the predictability of immutable infrastructure-ensuring test repeatability and results consistency.
Microservices architecture: in microservice-based systems, using immutable infrastructure will make it perfect to have uniformity across distributed services when it comes to service deployment and hence easing troubleshooting and reconfiguration-free service updates.

Terraform and infrastructure management

Terraform is a popular infrastructure-as-code tool that can support both models, i.e., mutable and immutable, thus making it quite helpful in multi-cloud environment management. With Terraform organization, a particular configuration needs to be written only once, and then it can be used again for any environment, whether it works under a mutable or an immutable approach.

The in-place updates provided by Terraform through ‘terraform apply’ allow for gradual modification without destroying it and are a blessing in the case of legacy applications/ systems where a minimal amount of downtime is required.

Terraform can always be configured in an immutable infrastructure that will be automatically fully redeployed using the terraform destroy and terraform apply features to apply the recreated resources based on a predefined configuration. This makes it a really good choice for environments where consistency is of top concern, as every deployment then is going to be the same and up to the standards set by the organization.

Balancing Mutable and Immutable models for legacy systems and modern applications

In the real world of the cloud, many organizations find it convenient to use a combination of mutable and immutable models for different needs, e.g.

Legacy systems: keeping mutable infrastructure in place for legacy systems brings cost savings and reduces the need for redevelopment. However, this requires careful infrastructure management to avoid issues related to configuration drift.
New applications: for cloud-native applications based on microservices, the suitable approach is immutable infrastructure, proving much better scalability and consistency, as well as enhanced security.

This hybrid strategy enables an organization to serve both existing, new, and old traditional applications. Thus, with little interference in the existing business flow, support for modern applications is made possible.

Cloud Infrastructure minimal downtime strategy

Among any model of infrastructure, one of the primary goals is to introduce minimal downtime, which is more so in sectors where service availability is proportional to the satisfaction of their customers. Various strategies can be employed under both the mutable as well as the immutable models towards the achievement of this:

Blue-Green deployments: in environments of immutable infrastructure, blue-green deployments create two identical environments (blue and green) from which changes are made in the inactive one, after which the switch can be made to the live one, thus minimizing the disruption.
Canary deployments: in mutable infrastructure, canary deployments enable administrators to roll out the updates to a small subset of users first before going all-in. This drastically lowers the risk of downtime since any issues can be identified much earlier.
Zero-Downtime deployments with Terraform: Terraform’s organization of resources in modular, reusable configurations gives fine-grained control over the deployment process, enabling administrators to do rolling updates and other zero-downtime techniques in mutable environments.

Choice of proper infrastructure model

After all, choosing between mutable and immutable forms of infrastructure entails considerations not only of system requirements and legacy compatibility but also of vendor tolerances for downtime. Both approaches have something unique, and those facilities must be selectively emulated to serve certain purposes.

Terraform’s flexibility to support both models allows organizations to very conveniently create, modify, and manage the infrastructures under both efficient incremental updates with mutable models and full redeployment with immutable setups. Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of each model helps IT teams to take educated decisions, fine-tune management of infrastructure, and have reliable-scalable cloud environments.

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