Infrastructure as Code

The practice, and supporting toolsets, that allow engineers to define, deploy, modify and delete infrastructure resources through the use of text-based templates combined with tools that apply those templates to one or more service providers.

Benefits

The benefits of infrastructure-as-code are:

• the ability to store configurations in normal versioning controls
• the potential to maintain infrastructure definitions alongside the application code that requires the infrastructure
• ease of replication of environments e.g. for setting up development or test environments
• repeatability
• depending on the toolset, potentially eases the task of migrating infrastructure between cloud providers.

Infrastructure as Code tools

Some examples

• Ansible
• Terraform