What is Infrastructure as Code and why should you go for it?

End-to-end automation of the software development process is the thing now. In recent years, one can surely say that automation of the overall application development process has gone mainstream although individual parts of the overall process like testing are automated for a while now. But managing and provisioning IT infrastructure was the one area that was a little ignored part in this age of automation. I know there are a lot of tools with fancy dashboards that give you health updates and do the provisioning part for the infrastructure. But that is just a part of infrastructure automation, which simply means replicating steps multiple times and reproducing already produced outputs several times on several servers. In reality, it is just replication to reduce human intervention and the time involved in doing so. With the kind of applications in place and the new age IT environments, that are more dynamic than ever, you need something that will not only scale faster but also will maintain consistency of performance in addition to functional and physical attributes. And Infrastructure as Code could just be the thing.

What is Infrastructure as Code (IaC)?

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) involves replacing manual processes and standard operating procedures to configure discrete hardware devices and operating systems with code or an application that will automatically manage and provision the technology stack. A typical infrastructure consists of components like databases, servers, applications, and networks interlinking all the aforementioned. In IaC, also known as software-defined infrastructure, you can configure and deploy these infrastructure components faster with consistency by treating them as an application.

So every time you need to configure an Infrastructure you don’t need to go to the sysadmin guys, raise a request, create a ticket, and wait for them to attend it. Instead, your developers and operations teams can easily do that using application.

Why IaC?

Just like any automation process, the obvious benefits here are cost, simplicity, and speed. Because with IaC your Sysadmins can work on tasks with more priority and your developers along with DevOps processes can work more efficiently. You can answer their infrastructure requirements more dynamically than ever and you can …read more