Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Infrastructure as code is the practice of storing the definition of infrastructure as one or more files. This replaces the traditional model where infrastructure as a service is provisioned manually, usually through shell scripts or other configuration tools.

Problem it addresses

Building applications in a cloud native way requires infrastructure to be disposable and reproducible. It also needs to scale on-demand in an automated and repeatable way, potentially without human intervention. Manual provisioning cannot meet the responsiveness and scale requirements of cloud native applications. Manual infrastructure changes are not reproducible, quickly run into scale limits, and introduces misconfiguration errors.

How it helps

By representing the data center resources such as servers, load balancers, and subnets as code, it allows infrastructure teams to have a single source of truth for all configurations and also allows them to manage their data center in a CI/CD pipeline, implementing version control and deployment strategies.