In this article, take an in-depth look at how Infrastructure as Code (IaC) works, its benefits, and common challenges.
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This is an article from DZone’s 2023 DevOps Trend Report.
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Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the practice of provisioning and managing infrastructure using code and software development techniques. The main idea behind IaC is to eliminate the need for manual infrastructure provisioning and configuration of resources such as servers, load balancers, or databases with every deployment. As infrastructure is now an integral part of the overall software development process and is becoming more tightly coupled with application delivery, it’s important that we make it easier to deliver infrastructure changes.
Using code to define and manage infrastructure and its configuration enables you to employ techniques like version control, testing, and automated deployments. This makes it easier to prevent all sorts of application issues, from performance bottlenecks to functionality failures.
This article will explain how IaC works, highlighting both approaches, as well as the benefits and challenges of delivering infrastructure as code within a DevOps environment.
Historically, infrastructure management was mostly a manual process done by specialized system administrators. You needed to manually create virtual machines (VMs), manage their software updates, and configure their settings. This became highly expensive and time-consuming, especially with the rapid pace of modern software development.
IaC evolved as a solution for scalable infrastructure management. It allows you to codify the infrastructure to then be able to create standardized, reusable, and sharable configurations. IaC also allows you to define infrastructure configurations in the form of a code file.
