Diving deeper into IaC tools and strategies

Before we dive into the practical exercises in this chapter, we will first establish a clear understanding of IaC in this section and discuss how it can be harnessed for building complex penetration testing labs.

Demystifying IaC

IaC is the practice and process of using code to provision and manage infrastructure resources. This code works similarly to how a blueprint of a house is used as a reference when building the actual house. The cool thing when dealing with IaC code is that the actual infrastructure resources are created and configured automatically from the code that represents the desired final state of the infrastructure. Behind the scenes, the IaC automation tools simply make use of the same set of APIs we would use when trying to automate specific processes. The process is illustrated in the following diagram:

Figure 3.1 – Using IaC tools and services to create and manage cloud resources...