Using orchestration to manage services and infrastructure
While configuring Fastly services can be done as an occasional process via the web interface, CLI, or API, it's often important to ensure that the detail of your Fastly configuration is captured and tracked alongside the evolution of your application code.
Orchestration, the process of automating many tasks into a coherent workflow, can help here by taking a description of a set of resources and creating those resources in a repeatable way. Using this principle to describe Fastly (or other vendors') services is called infrastructure as code (IaC).
Infrastructure as Code
The key principle of IaC is to define your requirements within a 'definition' file using a declarative approach. The definition files define 'what' rather than 'how', while the software system used to support these definition files identifies the desired state and executes what needs to happen to achieve the desired state.
Fastly has developed an orchestration solution built using the popular Terraform tool to configure, manage and deploy Fastly services. To learn more about Terraform and the Fastly Terraform Provider, visit our Terraform page.
