Debugging infrastructure issues can be cumbersome… especially at 3AM/ during critical downtimes 🤯. Despite the best practices and cutting-edge tools, you might find yourself struggling to resolve critical issues swiftly.

Here are five key reasons why debugging your infrastructure in under an hour can be so challenging:

1. Lack of Centralized Visibility

The Challenge

One of the most significant issues in debugging is the lack of a centralized view of your infrastructure. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) codebases are often fragmented, with resources spread across multiple repositories, and IaC code coverage is rarely 100%.

Example

Imagine you get an alert from PagerDuty: one of your VMs is down, and you only have its ID. You need to find its code definition through multiple IaC repositories—if it’s defined in the code at all. Often, it’s not the VM causing the issue but the load balancer or the IAM role attached to it. It’s like searching for a needle in a haystack. You lose critical time searching, especially during an outage.

Good Practices : Tagging

• Terraform Techniques: Use modules and templates to enforce consistent tags across resources.

• Terratag by env0: Automate tagging in your Terraform configurations.

• Yor by Bridgecrew: Automate tagging across various IaC frameworks for consistency.

• Brainboard: Visual design tool for tagging resources collectively.

• Cloudcraft: Visualize and tag your architecture for better organization.

• Inframap by Cycloid: Visualize and manage your infrastructure with consistent tagging across resources.

2. Inadequate Historical Data and Change Tracking

The Challenge

Debugging often requires understanding what has changed over time. Without adequate historical data and change tracking, pinpointing when and what went wrong becomes a guessing game.

Example

You're investigating a deployment failure. You start creating consecutive git diffs to manually track recent changes in code and configuration. This process is tedious and time-consuming, and without a detailed change history, identifying the exact cause of the issue is challenging.

Good Practices : Detailed Change Tracking

Implementing robust change tracking practices can help quickly identify issues. For larger codebases with multiple repositories, develop custom scripts to automate the tracking of changes across all repositories, ensuring a comprehensive view of your infrastructure’s evolution.

3. “Terraform Plan” : An Insufficient Impact Analysis?

The Challenge

When debugging infra, it’s vital to understand the impact of changes. Without proper tools to anticipate how changes will affect the production environment, you might fix one issue only to cause another.

Example

You update a Terraform module in one repository but you don’t realize the impacts it has on unexpected downstream terraform files.

Good Practices : Comprehensive Impact Analysis

Utilizing thorough impact analysis practices ensures smoother updates and fewer issues:

• Thorough CI/CD Review Process: Implement an exhaustive CI/CD review process to ensure all changes are thoroughly vetted and safe before deployment.

• Terragrunt: Use Terragrunt to manage Terraform configurations and dependencies, enabling better understanding and control over changes.

• Terramate: Leverage Terramate for advanced workflows and dependency management in Terraform, ensuring changes are safely propagated.

• Spacelift: Adopt Spacelift for its robust infrastructure-as-code management and policy enforcement, helping predict and mitigate impacts of changes.

4. A Fragmented Documentation

The Challenge

Infrastructure documentation is often scattered across various tools and formats… if it's defined at all.

Example

You're on call when an incident occurs, and the code isn't yours. You need to understand the dependencies between services quickly. However, the relevant documentation is scattered across Confluence, GitHub README files, internal wikis etc… significantly slowing down your response time.

5. Organizational Complexity from Mergers and Acquisitions

The Challenge

Modern infrastructures are complex due to your company’s journey, including numerous mergers and acquisitions. You often find yourself monitoring systems built by different organizations, each with its own tools and processes.

Example

Different teams within your organization may use various cloud providers such as AWS, GCP, or Azure. Each team manages its own stack with separate service accounts, making it challenging to obtain a comprehensive view of the entire infrastructure.

Another Solution : Anyshift

Debugging infrastructure issues swiftly is a formidable challenge due to the complexities and fragmentation inherent in modern environments.

Anyshift's cloud-to-code search engine provides a unified view of your infrastructure, integrating data from various sources. This enables SREs to quickly correlate infrastructure and application resources with their definitions in Git repositories. By centralizing visibility, historical data, and change tracking across multi-cloud environments, Anyshift significantly reduces debugging time and improves impact analysis, streamlining the entire process.

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Roxane from Anyshift 🙂

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