Chapter 2: Examining the State of Infrastructure Automation

This chapter will look at the history of infrastructure automation, its evolution, and its current state. We will explore how the evolving situation in the cloud-native ecosystem and agile engineering practices exposes the limitations of Infrastructure as Code (IaC). We will also examine how control plane-based infrastructure automation is a cutting-edge technique that solves the limitations of IaC and can change the DevOps operating model to move software engineering further in a positive direction.

The chapter will dive deep into the following topics:

• The history of infrastructure automation
• The limitations of IaC
• The need for end-to-end automation
• Multi-cloud automation requirements
• Crossplane as a cloud control plane
• Other similar projects