Infrastructure as Code

Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) is the shift to a complete ‘new’ way of working with infrastructures.

What is Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC)?

Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) is making configuration, management, and provisioning of your infrastructure reproducible, scalable, easy to maintain and review, by using code. IaC has established itself as a de facto industry standard over the past few years.

For a long time, we managed servers manually in our data centers. Management tooling was available, but with the introduction of configuration management and Infrastructure-as-Code, everything changed. By codifying your configuration specifications, IaC becomes your single point of truth and documentation for your environment.

Configuration files contain infrastructure specifications, which makes it easier to edit and distribute configurations. It also ensures that you can repeatedly provision the same environment.

Today, most of the world’s infrastructure is being hosted in data centers owned by cloud providers.
Infrastructure within these cloud providers consists of:

• Networks
• (App)services
• Databases
• Load balancers
• Firewalls
• Cloud container platforms (Kubernetes)
• Virtual machines
• Storage
• Connection topology, etc.

Cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure, treat infrastructure as ‘software’. Because of this realization, the same approach for software development can be applied. So versioning, testing, and reviewing are important parts of IaC. DevOps teams should use source control. When a change is required, one simply opens up the Pull Request to a repository, goes through the review process, and then the changes will eventually be applied to the cloud platform or platforms (hybrid cloud solution) of your choice.

Why apply Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC)?

Benefits

Using a DevOps-style tool with source control, when a change is required, one simply opens up the Pull Request to a repository, goes through the review process, and then the changes will eventually be applied.

This results in:

• Configuration consistency: Same code for non-prod and prod.
• Infrastructure is reproducible: You can use the same code for different workloads.
• Scalability: Adding additional services (1 or 10) makes no difference.
• Easy to maintain and review.
• Accountability: You can view who made changes and ask why.
• Speed.
• IaC is your single point of truth.

Challenges

• You need coders. If you don’t have this knowledge, you need to learn to code.
• This requires more knowledge from the engineers about the (cloud) infrastructure, services, and way of working.

Conclusion

Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) represents a fundamental shift in managing and provisioning infrastructure by treating infrastructure as software. By codifying configurations, IaC ensures consistency, reproducibility, scalability, and ease of maintenance across environments. Its adoption has become a standard practice, particularly among cloud providers like AWS, GCP, and Azure, where infrastructure components are treated as code.

While IaC offers numerous benefits—such as improved speed, accountability, and a single source of truth—its adoption comes with challenges. Engineers must possess coding skills and deeper knowledge of cloud infrastructure and services to effectively implement IaC. However, the long-term advantages of enhanced efficiency, reliability, and maintainability make IaC a powerful approach for modern infrastructure management.