What is Infrastructure as Code (IaC)?

#iac #cloudformation #concepts #beginners

Being a bit of a newbie to AWS and Cloud in general, one of the concepts that have always puzzled me is 'IaC' aka Infrastructure as Code.

It has taken me a while to understand it, but once I did, I finally understood the importance of it - it hit me like a train.

AWS has a core service available called 'CloudFormation' which is AWS's native version of infrastructure as code. I found it really hard at first to get the hang of what this does but after playing with it myself I see now that it forms one of the core functions of DevOps and Pipelines.

Here is a good quote from Karl Cardenas on IaC.

What is IaC?

Infrastructure as Code is nothing more than replacing the traditional manual provisioning of infrastructure through admin consoles/GUI with a programming-based approach (think scripting). Instead of clicking on buttons and navigating through various screens to deploy/enable infrastructure, instead those actions are now achieved through a codified approach.

IaC is heavily leveraged in dynamic infrastructure environments such as public cloud platforms due to the ability to provision and/or deprovision a large number of resources quickly through APIs. Without IaC this could be a tedious and arduous process. It’s important to note that IaC is not a new concept and it’s something that infrastructure analyst have done for many years through scripting and chaining commands together. What is different today in regard to IaC is the code aspect of it.

This really helped me understand the concept more. For anyone out there wishing to learn more about Infrastructure as Code then I recommend the following resources as they helped me significantly: