What is infrastructure-as-code (IaC)?

At first glance, it may seem that infrastructure-as-code really isn’t bringing anything new to the table—it’s just changing what has traditionally been a manual task (configuring IT infrastructure), and making it a digital one. But with this switch comes the solutions to several key problems that have been facing IT personnel for decades.

Managing IT infrastructure is not only complex and labour intensive, it’s also costly. At each stage of the process, engineers, maintenance technicians and others have to be available to perform essential tasks. Organisations need to be able to meet the salary needs of these experts. On top of that, ensuring proper coordination and resource deployment demands necessitates increased management costs.

Monitoring and visibility issues are likewise potential problems in traditional configuration. Traditional infrastructure configuration relies on multiple individuals or teams, creating inconsistency and often making monitoring and performance optimisation extremely difficult. That inconsistency can also lead to problems of misconfiguration where an incorrect parameter is used which can result in potentially serious consequences. Misconfiguration has been blamed for many high-profile outages of systems that affect many people.

Finally, because manual configuration depends on system administrators to set up new servers, it responds slowly to increased demand. As need for resources spikes, manual configuration can prevent effective scaling and make it difficult for businesses to handle the increased load. And, without available back-up servers, then application availability suffers.

DevOps experiences its own problems when working with traditional configuration techniques. Instead of identifying and eliminating misconfigurations and other problems during the build process, traditional management all but ensures that these issues remain unnoticed until runtime. And, by having to reallocate developer resources to address these issues at runtime, organisations are forced to pull experienced professionals from other important tasks, without actually addressing the core fault.

Additionally, newly configured infrastructure must be capable of joining the organisation’s existing environment. Manual configuration can create security and compliance issues in the context of the broader environment, particularly as the cloud is a dynamic and constantly changing entity.

When configuration is the responsibility of human IT personnel and operations teams, discrepancies are unavoidable. But when IaC files exist as the primary source of truth, organisations can add configuration data management tools and policies to consistently deploy the right configurations as many times as needed.

A sometimes overlooked advantage of IaC files is that they maintain a clear record of any and all changes. Teams can easily review what changes have been made, when, and (in the event that accountability becomes an issue) by whom. And, because IaC maintains previous versions in an accessible repository, developers can return to previous instances and redeploy earlier environments in the event that problems arise.

Taken all together, perhaps the greatest advantages of IaC are reduced costs and increased returns. By automating configuration and deployment, organisations cut many of the expenses associated with hardware, staffing, training and management, while also allowing experienced IT personnel to refocus their energies on tasks that bring in greater value.

Add to this the aforementioned speed, consistency and efficiency, and it becomes clearer how IaC investments are capable of paying for themselves extremely quickly.