Infrastructure as code

Until recently, infrastructure deployment has been an extremely time-consuming and expensive process. In a typical organization, a team of system administrators would be responsible for deploying hardware and software on several environments using a series of manually executed steps. Due to its manual nature, this process has major deficiencies:

• Unique settings per environment: Every individual environment can have unique settings. To meet these requirements, the manual steps need to be documented for each environment.
• Time-consuming: The documentation and execution of manual steps are very time-consuming.
• Inconsistent and error-prone: Following manual steps for infrastructure deployments can lead to inconsistencies and errors.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a practice to deploy and manage infrastructure components using source code. Using IaC, the system administration teams (also known as DevOps) are no longer bound by manual practices...