An introduction to IaC

IaC had a significant impact beyond bringing infrastructure and software development teams together; the practice also made it much easier and safer to deploy infrastructure for projects. By defining the infrastructure and storing the specifications in a software project, the infrastructure code could be tested in the same way that the software project was tested. As with testing code, consistently testing infrastructure code reduces bugs, surfaces inefficiencies, and increases confidence in the infrastructure deployment process.

We take it for granted today, but in many organizations, working with infrastructure administrators to build a cluster for a non-trivial application could take weeks. Taking that same experience, condensing it into a handful of files, and then being able to deploy a cluster in minutes was a game changer.

There are many IaC tools available. Each has its own flavor for how the tool approaches the problem of describing and provisioning...