Infrastructure as Code

Infrastructure as Code

Infrastructure as Code

Our application is growing. Every new project needs virtual machines. Storage. Load Balancers. Databases. Networks. Security rules. Engineers log into the cloud console and create everything manually. Again. And again. And again. Soon another problem appears. One engineer forgets a security rule. Another creates a database with different settings. A third accidentally skips a step. Even though everyone is building the same application, every environment becomes slightly different. The engineering problem became obvious. How do we build identical cloud infrastructure every single time? The engineering concept that solved this problem is Infrastructure as Code (IaC). Instead of creating cloud resources manually, engineers describe the entire infrastructure in a configuration file. The cloud reads that file and automatically creates everything exactly as specified. The infrastructure becomes repeatable. Version controlled. Reviewable. Just like application code. Amazon Web Services provides this through AWS CloudFormation. Microsoft Azure provides Azure Resource Manager (ARM) Templates and Bicep. Google Cloud provides Deployment Manager and increasingly Infrastructure Manager. Different names. One engineering concept. Cloud infrastructure became software. But another question soon followed. Once everything is running... how do we know if something goes wrong?