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Infrastructure as code (IaC) is the ability to provision and support your computing infrastructure using code instead of manual processes and settings. Any application environment requires many infrastructure components like operating systems, database connections, and storage. Developers have to regularly set up, update, and maintain the infrastructure to develop, test, and deploy applications.
Manual infrastructure management is time-consuming and prone to error — especially when you manage applications at scale. Infrastructure as code lets you define your infrastructure’s desired state without including all the steps to get to that state. It automates infrastructure management so developers can focus on building and improving applications instead of managing environments. Organizations use infrastructure as code to control costs, reduce risks, and respond with speed to new business opportunities.
What are the benefits of IaC?
- Easily duplicate an environment — The same environment can be deployed on a different system in another location using the same IaC, as long as the infrastructure resources are available.
- Reduce configuration errors — Manual configuration is error-prone due to human involvement. People make mistakes. Or there could be configuration drift due to changes in one setup (like a developer environment) that was missed in another setup (like a test environment).
Approaches to IaC
There are two different approaches to infrastructure as code.
Declarative
Declarative IaC allows a developer to describe resources and settings that make up the end state of a desired system. The IaC solution then creates this system from the infrastructure code. This makes declarative IaC simple to use, as long as the developer knows which components and settings they need to run their application.
Imperative
Imperative IaC allows a developer to describe all the steps to set up the resources and get to the desired system and running state. While it isn’t as simple to write imperative IaC as declarative IaC, the imperative approach becomes necessary in complex infrastructure deployments. This is especially true when the order of events is critical.