Chapter 13: Infrastructure as Code with Terraform

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the practice of provisioning computing infrastructure using machine-readable, declarative specifications or imperative code, rather than using an interactive configuration tool. IaC became increasingly popular with the rise of cloud computing. Infrastructure administrators who were previously maintaining long-lived infrastructure found themselves needing to scale in both agility and capacity as companies adopted cloud infrastructure.

Remember that at this time, software teams and infrastructure teams were unlikely to work closely together until a software project needed to be deployed. IaC created a bridge between infrastructure administrators and software developers by establishing a shared set of documents that described the desired infrastructure for the software project. The IaC specifications or code often live within or alongside the project. By establishing this shared context between software...