pyiaacsync 0.5

Deploy infrastructure as code via polling

PyIAACSync

Introduction

infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform and Palumi are gaining popularity and increasingly becoming neceessary to support the principles of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE).

However, there are a couple of disadvantages in existing tools in the market:

• Terraform requires knowledge of golang to be able to sync assets
• Both Terraform and Palumi plugins can be quite complex for beginners to manage and maintain - As in 2023, Terraform plugins require modules to be built in golang
• In a shared environment, where some assets are being built manually while others are being built using automation, tools like Terraform Automation can fail if assets managed by automation are deleted

PyIAACSync provides a framework which allows software engineering teams getting into infrastructure-as-code to easily create and sync assets which they have defined in YAML spec files, in a polled manner (non-event driven). The infrastructue components can be anything (AWS asset, GCP asset, any SIEM detection rule) that can be: a. described in YAML files, and b. can be read, created or deleted via API calls

Software engineers need to create the following to leverage pyiaacsync:

1. A folder (iaac_sync_folder) that contains the specs/configs for the infrastructure to create
2. A simple asset python file that contains a class describing the asset with the following static functions:
   • validate: to validate whether the spec/config that has been supplied in the
   • create: to create the asset via the supplied spec/config
   • delete: to delete that has been supplied via the spec/config
   • check: to check whether the asset that has been deployed matches the spec/config aka integrity check. If not, the asset will be re-created

Please see Usage section that describes the example in more detail

Install

via PyPI

python3 -m pip install pyiaacsync

Manually

Install all necessary dependencies as follows:

python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

Structure

We will be using the example example-fileasset described in the examples folder of this repository. Users of this repo can use the files in the examples folder (especially fileasset.py) to build their own assets with pyiaacsync.py.

In this folder, we have the following objects:

• exampleconf: a folder which contains 3 spec/config files (1 file is in a subfolder) that describe what kind of file to create
• fileasset.py: A python file that contains the fileasset which defines how to validate the spec config file, create asset from the spec / config file, delete the existing asset created from the config file and also check if the the created asset is different from the config file
• example.py: the main script which will invoke the creation of assets using pyiaacsync conf file

Note that pyiaacsync also has an args option available in __init__ which can be used to provide any additional optional parameters as a dict that can be used by the asset class. Uncomment the random_args set line in example.py to see how it can be used:

...
    random_args = {}
    ## uncomment line below to demonstrate how the random arguments can work
    #random_args = {'message': 'hello world'}

Actions

init

The first steps is to execute init which will create a new state file out-teststate.yaml:

python3 example.py -a init

To force re-creation of the state file even if it exists (NOTE: Beware this will delete the existing state file!):

python3 example.py -a init -if

We can also specify an existing state file to use:

python3 example.py -a init -if -f /tmp/out-teststatefile.yaml

validate_configs

To validate the configs in the spec folder for all existing assets using the validate function defined in fileasset.py class:

python3 example.py -a validate_configs

sync

To sync the assets based on the spec/configs folder continuously - this will create the files as per the configs in the folder. Any changes made to the files the next time will be reset.

python3 example.py -a sync

To sync the assets once only:

python3 example.py -a sync_once

delete_assets

To delete all existing assets (in this case, all files) and remove the assets from the state file:

python3 example.py -a delete_assets

TODO

• Add unit testing
• Fix the comments for create asset
• Fix the bug in deleteasset
• Add an assumption: Assuming that the API works ok - every action performed once (no retry)