Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Transforming How We Build and Manage Infrastructure
In the days of traditional IT infrastructure, setting up new infrastructure was a slow, manual process involving physical machines, configuration files residing on multiple hosts, and processes stored in the minds of experienced system administrators. This process made it not only possible to make errors, but also made it unscalable. The growth of the underlying system made it harder to maintain speed, consistency, and control.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) represented an evolution in infrastructure management that changed how we manage infrastructure in contemporary software delivery lifecycles.
This complete guide will walk you through what IaC is, why it has become important in the DevOps world, the category of tools which dominate the operational landscape, and how you can start your own journey toward real-life implementation.
💡 What is Infrastructure as Code?
Infrastructure as Code is the practice of provisioning and managing computing infrastructure through machine-readable definition files, rather than through interactive configuration tools or manual management processes.
It can be summed up with this analogy:
"If your application code lives in Git, why not your infrastructure?"
IaC affords consistent, repeatable, and version-controlled management of the entire environment — including virtual machines, databases, networking rules, and load balancers.
Why Infrastructure as Code is Important in DevOps
Infrastructure as Code is not just a method of automating setups; it is a fundamental component of modern DevOps.
So why is it so important?
1. Consistency Across Environments
In manual setups, you can lose consistency between your environments- you think, staging environments are similar enough to production, but this leads to "it worked on my machine" issues.
With IaC you can:
- Use the same configuration for creating the dev, test and production environments.
- Get rid of configuration drift.
- Ensure that each environment is identical and predictable.
2. Speed & Agility
Provisioning a new server would take hours or days, but with IaC you can provision it within minutes (or even seconds).
- Provisions infrastructure when you need it
- Recovers quickly from failures by re-deploying it.
- Enables changes to be rolled out quickly, speeding time-to-market.
3. Version Control
IaC treats your infrastructure the same way you treat your software code.
- Definitions of your infrastructure in are stored in Git
- You can track what and who changed what, when and why
- Rolling back to a previous version is trivial
- You can create code review workflows with your infrastructure changes.
4. More Collaboration
With IaC:
- Developers, operations and security teams speak the same language- code.
- All teams can now collaborate on the definitions of infrastructure
- Automated pipelines can reduce time delays with handoffs.
5. Reduced Risk and Human Error
Manual configuration changes are prone to error. With IaC teams can:
- Automate deployments
- Run tests on infrastructure that are automated.
- Deploy in a controlled and repeatable manner
IaC in the DevOps Pipeline
In a DevOps CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery), IaC plays an important role in automating:
Learn More: https://www.sevenmentor.com/de....vops-training-in-pun
