For most DevOps and Infrastructure Engineers, managing a multi-IaC environment can be a complex task. Let’s say your Terraform code might set a security group to allow only internal traffic, but later, it’s altered by your teammate to permit internet access through the cloud’s console. This kind of drift creates some serious security gaps, like exposing sensitive databases, storage buckets, or any internal APIs which may lead to compliance issues in the future.

In this blog, we’ll cover what an IaC is and the challenges of managing multiple IaC tools. We will dive into cloud drift, security, and governance with the best practices to keep your cloud under control.

What is Infrastructure as Code (IaC)?

Infrastructure as Code is the practice of defining and managing cloud infrastructure using code instead of setting it up using the cloud console or CLI. By defining resources in code, IaC ensures consistent deployments, enables version tracking for infrastructure changes, and automates resource provisioning. This makes it easier to manage and replicate environments, whether they’re on cloud platforms or on-premises.

There is a wide range of IaC tools available on the market, such as CloudFormation and CDK (Cloud Development Kit). With CloudFormation, you can define cloud resources in simple templates, while CDK enhances this by letting you write infrastructure using familiar programming languages like Python, JavaScript, or TypeScript. These tools align well with IaC principles, especially for teams heavily invested in AWS.

For teams requiring greater flexibility or operating across multiple cloud providers, there are other popular IaC tools such as Terraform, OpenTofu, Pulumi, and Cloudformation. Terraform is widely used for its cloud-agnostic nature, allowing configuration across multiple cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud through a unified codebase. OpenTofu, an open-source alternative to Terraform, is also gaining popularity due to its licensing and community-driven development.

Each IaC tool comes with its own set of pros and cons, enabling teams to define, manage, and automate infrastructure across various cloud providers. This ensures that deployments remain consistent, well-documented, and easily replicable, regardless of the cloud environment.

The Shift to Multi-IaC

Now, as organizations scale their cloud infrastructure, they are moving towards using multiple IaC tools to meet diverse project needs. The number of such organizations continues to increase. While Terraform has been a long-time favorite for its flexibility and ability to work across various cloud providers, recent license changes have led teams to consider open-source alternatives, such as OpenTofu or Pulumi. Firefly’s survey shows that while 80% of cloud practitioners still use Terraform, a growing number are exploring other options due to these licensing shifts and Terraform’s move under new ownership.

For large organizations, using multiple IaC tools is often practical. Teams managing core infrastructure across AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure may prefer Terraform for its cross-cloud compatibility, while an AWS-focused team might opt for CloudFormation or CDK for a strong integration with AWS services. Kubernetes teams often use Helm to manage containerized applications, but for infrastructure provisioning, they may rely on tools like Terraform or Pulumi to ensure consistency across clusters.

This shift to multi-IaC provides developers with flexibility and brings their own set of challenges. With different tools managing different parts of the infrastructure, one such challenge is configuration drift, which causes state mismatch and misconfiguration. 

In order to bring, track, and monitor the parts of your infrastructure deployed using multiple IaC tools under one umbrella, organizations are turning to tools like Firefly. It offers full visibility and control over cloud environments even when multiple IaC tools are in use. As teams adopt various tools, such as Terraform, CloudFormation, CDK, and Helm, keeping resources aligned and preventing drift becomes more difficult. Firefly provides a centralized view of IaC coverage, making it easy for the teams to see which resources are managed, unmanaged, or “ghosted” (existing in the cloud without IaC tracking).

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The Firefly dashboard, as shown above, gives a clear summary of asset coverage, highlighting all the resources that are properly codified and those that are unmanaged or untracked. This helps teams quickly identify gaps in IaC governance, reducing risks and avoiding unnecessary costs caused by drift. By categorizing assets and tracking their status across all the IaC tools, Firefly simplifies managing multiple IaC tools, making sure that each resource matches its IaC configuration.

With Firefly’s insights, teams can easily spot gaps, prevent unintended changes, and maintain a consistent infrastructure across different clouds and IaC tools, solving a major challenge in today’s complex, multi-cloud environments.

Governance and Security in Multi-IaC

Security, compliance, and governance become more critical when managing your cloud infrastructure with a multi-IaC setup. In the shared responsibility model of cloud providers like AWS, the provider secures the underlying infrastructure. At the same time, the customer is responsible for ensuring every resource they deploy, such as network configurations, storage, and application setups, are secure. This means that while AWS handles the physical security of its data centers, it’s up to your team to ensure that your cloud resources are configured securely.

In a multi-IaC environment, this responsibility is spread across multiple infrastructure tools, such as Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi, and teams. Without a strong governance framework, configurations can easily drift, exposing the infrastructure to security risks and compliance issues. Governance helps keep everything aligned, making sure that all of the resources meet security standards, follow tagging policies, and remain easy to audit.

For Tagging

For example, a tagging policy. Many organizations require every resource, whether it’s managed through Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi, to have specific tags, such as the environment (dev, staging, production) and the owner (team name). This allows teams to track resources, manage costs, and ensure accountability across different environments. Without a proper governance framework, resources might lack these tags, making it difficult to track ownership or environment for effective management.

In regulated industries like finance and healthcare, governance policies play a key role in compliance. For example, PCI DSS (for payment data) and HIPAA (for healthcare data) require strict access control and encryption policies to protect sensitive information stored in cloud resources like databases and storage systems. With IaC, policies help enforce that access is restricted to specific IP ranges, databases remain encrypted, and logs are retained for auditing. However, these policies target cloud resources, and inconsistencies in applying them across different IaC tools can result in gaps that may lead to compliance issues or security risks.

For IAM Capabilities

Another area where governance plays a vital role is in IAM (Identity and Access Management). While AWS provides IAM capabilities, customers need to define specific users or roles with permissions to access their applications. In a multi-IaC setup, different teams may define various roles and permissions in separate tools. For example, one team might use Terraform while another uses CloudFormation, leading to inconsistencies in how permissions are defined. While the permissions themselves are determined by the cloud provider, the way they are specified varies between IaC tools, which can create challenges in ensuring consistent access controls.

A strong governance strategy can help ensure IAM roles and permissions are applied consistently, reducing the risk of any unauthorized access. In a multi-IaC environment, governance is not just a best practice; it’s important for security and compliance, enabling organizations to keep their infrastructure controlled, compliant, and safe as they scale across different platforms and tools.

Firefly: A Solution for Cloud Governance

To address these governance challenges within a multi-IaC setup, Firefly provides a solution that enhances visibility, control, and automation across cloud infrastructure governance. Firefly provides a comprehensive governance section that allows teams to enforce governance policies across all cloud resources, regardless of which IaC tool was used to create them. By centralizing policy management, Firefly makes sure that security, compliance, and governance standards are consistently followed across your infrastructure and cloud providers, such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure.

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With Firefly, teams gain immediate access to compliance frameworks such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, and SOC 2 without needing to set them up by themselves. Without Firefly, teams would typically need to create and configure compliance policies from scratch, map these policies to specific cloud resources, set up continuous monitoring for each policy, and manage alerts for violations. This process often requires dedicated time, specialized knowledge, and a substantial amount of effort to ensure compliance across every IaC-managed resource within their infrastructure.

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Firefly eliminates these complexities by providing pre-built compliance frameworks and automated monitoring, allowing teams to focus on their core tasks while knowing that their infrastructure meets industry standards.

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Firefly automatically identifies any non-compliant configurations and provides insights into the severity of each issue. This makes it easier to monitor compliance across categories like Access Control, Encryption, Networking, and more. For example, Firefly can detect and flag AWS S3 buckets that lack proper encryption or IAM roles in Azure that grant excessive permissions. By continuously monitoring cloud resources across environments, Firefly ensures that security policies are consistently enforced, helping teams quickly identify and correct any misconfigurations.

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Firefly also allows teams to define custom governance policies to meet their specific organizational requirements, going beyond just built-in compliance checks. This flexibility enables teams to meet the unique security and governance standards set by their organization for managing cloud infrastructure.

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This centralized approach to governance enables organizations to maintain strong security and compliance as they scale and adopt new IaC tools. Firefly ensures that every resource in the cloud environment aligns with security and compliance standards, protecting both the infrastructure and the data.

Managing Drift in Multi-IaC Environments

In IaC, drift refers to the difference between the actual state of your cloud resources and what’s defined in your IaC templates. Simply put, drift happens when changes are made directly in the cloud environment from the console or CLI without using the IaC tool, leading to inconsistencies and unexpected behavior within your infrastructure.

Managing these drifts becomes even more challenging in a multi-IaC setup. With teams using various IaC tools like Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi across multiple cloud platforms, manually tracking every change is nearly impossible. Each IaC tool manages configurations in its own way. When changes are made outside of these tools, such as directly in the cloud console, it can cause drift, meaning the actual state of the infrastructure no longer matches the defined state in the IaC.

Let’s consider an EBS volume originally configured with a size of 10 GiB in your Terraform code. A team member notices storage capacity issues and decides to increase the volume size to 20 GiB via the AWS console to quickly address the problem. 

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While this change fixes the immediate issue, it introduces drift because the Terraform code still defines the volume as 10 GiB.

Firefly: Solving for Configuration Drift

This is where Firefly comes in. Firefly automatically detects such drifts by continuously monitoring your cloud resources and comparing their current state against your IaC templates. As soon as a drift is detected, it’s highlighted in Firefly’s dashboard, allowing you to take immediate action.

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Firefly identifies the EBS volume drift and presents details such as the current size of 20 GiB compared to the defined 10 GiB in the Terraform code.

If the change is intentional, Firefly lets you codify the current state (20 GiB) into your Terraform configuration. This brings your IaC in line with the current state, ensuring that future deployments retain the necessary changes.

Firefly also provides an option to generate a pull request with the updated configuration, making it easy to incorporate changes into your existing GitOps workflows.

By using Firefly, you eliminate the effort required to track down drifts, ensuring your cloud infrastructure remains consistent, compliant, and aligned with your IaC code or templates. This automation not only saves time but also minimizes the risk of configuration errors and unexpected outages.

Disaster Recovery and Immutability

While we are talking about IaC, disaster recovery, and immutability are also important aspects of building a resilient and stable cloud environment. Disaster recovery focuses on restoring services after unexpected disruptions, such as region-wide outages, network failures, or provider-specific downtimes. Meanwhile, immutability makes sure that once resources are deployed, they remain unchanged unless intentionally updated through IaC. Together, these two practices enable teams to create reliable setups that can recover quickly from any incidents.

In a multi-region setup, disaster recovery involves replicating infrastructure across different regions. For example, an application might primarily run in us-east-1 but have a backup environment in us-west-2. If us-east-1 experiences an outage, traffic can be redirected to us-west-2, minimizing the downtime for the application. IaC makes it easy to automate, so both regions have the same setup and can quickly take over if something goes wrong.

Now, in a multi-cloud environment, disaster recovery can be more reliable because workloads are spread across different cloud providers. This reduces the risk of downtime since an issue with one provider won’t impact the entire system. However, managing resources across multiple clouds introduces added complexity in coordination and consistency. 

By using multiple cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, organizations can reduce the risk of downtime. If one provider experiences an outage, workloads can be shifted to another, ensuring continuity. This approach enhances reliability but managing infrastructure across different clouds requires a multi-IaC strategy. Each provider has its own tools and configurations, so using multiple IaC tools helps maintain consistency and control across diverse platforms.

IaC tools like Terraform simplify the process by allowing teams to define infrastructure that can be deployed across different clouds using a single set of configurations. This makes it easier to maintain consistency and quickly shift workloads between providers if one experiences downtime, ensuring your systems remain operational.

The codification status of your infrastructure is key for disaster recovery. When every resource is defined in code, the entire infrastructure can be quickly rebuilt from the latest code version, making sure everything is set up exactly as planned in the code. Having a fully codified setup means the environment is ready for disaster recovery, allowing teams to restore everything.

Here’s where Firefly makes a significant difference. With Firefly, teams gain visibility into which resources are codified and which are not, allowing them to assess disaster recovery readiness at a glance.

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Firefly not only identifies unmanaged resources but also provides options to instantly codify them, generating IaC code for any resource that lacks it. This feature makes sure that even previously unmanaged or adjusted resources through the cloud’s console are brought into the disaster recovery plan.

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During a region-wide outage, Firefly helps teams ensure that all resources are in sync with their IaC configurations. For instance, if temporary changes were made directly through the cloud provider's console to restore services quickly, Firefly identifies these adjustments. It then helps update the IaC configurations to reflect the current state, ensuring that future deployments remain consistent with the infrastructure design.

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By combining visibility, codification, and automation, Firefly simplifies disaster recovery in a multi-IaC setup, giving teams the confidence that their infrastructure is resilient, consistent, and ready to recover.

Best Practices for Multi-IaC Management

Now, let’s take a look at some of the best practices you should follow for managing your multi-IaC environments effectively.

1. Modular IaC Setup

Breaking infrastructure into modules simplifies management across different environments like development, staging, and production. This modular approach allows for code reuse, easier updates, and consistent configurations across all environments.

For example, you can create a reusable module for deploying EC2 instances with standard configurations such as security groups, IAM roles, and storage. This module can be customized for each environment by adjusting parameters like instance types, security groups, or network configurations, reducing the need for redundant code.

2. Governance as Code

Embedding governance policies directly into your IaC makes sure that resources meet organizational standards automatically. This involves setting up automated rules in your IaC templates to make sure all resources follow the correct naming, tagging, and security standards in every deployment. This helps keep everything consistent and reduces mistakes.

For example, using tools like AWS Config or Open Policy Agent, you can enforce compliance and security rules across your cloud resources. AWS Config lets you define rules to ensure that resources, such as EC2 instances or S3 buckets, meet specific criteria like having mandatory tags (Environment, Owner). If a resource doesn’t comply, AWS Config identifies it for review. 

Similarly, Open Policy Agent allows you to write policies that enforce security configurations, such as restricting public access to S3 buckets or ensuring that encryption is enabled. These tools help maintain consistent resource configurations, ensure compliance with internal policies, and make audits more straightforward.

3. Disaster Recovery with IaC

IaC makes disaster recovery easier by allowing quick recovery using predefined templates. If the main region fails, traffic can be directed to a backup region with the same setup already in place, keeping minimal downtime. This ensures the infrastructure stays consistent across all environments, avoiding complicated manual fixes during recovery.

For example, defining your infrastructure in code enables you to replicate the same setup, such as servers, databases, and network configurations in another region with minimal effort. This ensures that resources are consistent and ready to handle workloads in different locations.

By breaking IaC into modules, applying governance rules through code, and using IaC for disaster recovery, you can simplify multi-IaC management while keeping your setup consistent, compliant, and resilient.

Why IaC is a Must for Modern Cloud Operations?

In today’s rapidly growing cloud environments, IaC is more important than ever. Here’s why:

• Scaling Infrastructure: As your organization grows, scaling can become difficult. IaC makes this easier by letting teams define their infrastructure once and reuse it across different environments. This way, you can deploy the same setup for development, staging, and production without worrying about misconfigurations.
• Managing Drift: Drift, or the difference between your desired state and actual cloud resources, can lead to unexpected behaviors and security risks. IaC provides a structured way to manage configurations, making sure that any drift is detected and corrected promptly. With regular checks, teams can keep their infrastructure aligned with the defined state.
• Simplifying Disaster Recovery: Disasters like outages or data loss can happen anytime. With IaC, disaster recovery becomes straightforward. You can quickly rebuild your entire infrastructure from code, ensuring that everything is restored to its previous state. This reduces downtime and allows for a faster recovery process, keeping critical applications available.
• Controlling Costs: Without IaC, managing your cloud resources can result in using more than necessary or forgetting to shut down instances, which increases costs. IaC helps by giving a clear view of what’s deployed, making it easier to track and optimize resources. Automated scaling and configuration also help keep costs in check.

Managing all these aspects across multiple IaC tools and providers can be a bit challenging, but Firefly makes it much easier for us. Firefly provides a unified platform to track, codify, and manage your infrastructure, ensuring consistency and compliance across your entire cloud setup. It helps detect drift, automate disaster recovery processes, and optimize resource usage, all from a single dashboard. With Firefly, teams can confidently scale their cloud operations while keeping their infrastructure secure, efficient, and cost-effective.

To dive even deeper, watch our latest on-demand webinar: How to Get Control Over the Multi-IaC Stack.