Engineering
Infrastructure as code
Also called
- IaC
- Terraform
Infrastructure built by hand is undocumented by definition — the only record of what exists is what exists. Rebuilding it means reconstructing decisions nobody wrote down, usually during an incident.
Infrastructure as code makes the environment a reviewable artifact. Changes go through the same review as application code, environments can be recreated identically, and the difference between staging and production becomes visible instead of mysterious.
The immediate benefit most teams feel is disaster recovery going from a multi-day archaeology exercise to running a command.
It is the difference between 'we can rebuild this environment' as a hope and as a tested fact.
Commonly misunderstood
What people get wrong
The claim
“Our setup is simple enough not to need it.”
What is actually true
Simple setups are the ones where the manual change made at 2am is never noticed until it is load-bearing.
Related terms
Next step
Working through a infrastructure as code decision?
Tell us the situation. We will give you the tradeoffs as we see them, including when the answer is that you do not need what you are being sold.
No pitch deck. A 30-minute conversation about what you are trying to achieve.