Infrastructure as Code (IaC) might look like a buzz word in the not so distant past but in today's DevOps world it is gradually becoming a standard. You may likely wonder, what is Infrastructure as Code and why is it transformational in DevOps? Let us take a quick look at DevOps.

DevOps is a curled from the Development team (Dev) and Operations team (Ops) in software creation. However, DevOps is said to make software delivery more efficient because it is about the people, process, tools and culture. Many companies that have adopted DevOps have reported significant improvement in their software delivery. Four core values have been identified in DevOps: Culture, Automation, Measurement, and Sharing. Infrastructure as Code is one of the numerous automation aspects of DevOps and the idea behind IaC is that you write and execute code to define, deploy, update, and destroy your infrastructure. You can manage everything in code be it servers, databases, networks, documentation and all other essentials.

Five broad categories of IaC tools are in the use mainly:

1. Ad Hoc Scripts: You can use your favorite scripting language such as Bash, Ruby, Python to define each step in a code and execute the script. However, the challenge is that you can write the code anyhow you love it, and it may be challenging to maintain a large repository of scripts.

2. Configuration Management Tools: Chef, Puppet and Ansible at tools that are designed to install and manage software on existing servers, and they are very efficient with such tasks.

3. Server Templating Tools: Docker, Packer and Vagrant can be found in this category. They are useful in creating images of a fully self-container that has the operating system, software, files, dependencies and other relevant details needed. These images can be virtual machine (VM) or containers which are light weight and fast.

4. Orchestration Tools: Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Amazon Elastic Container Services (ECS) can be found in this category. These tools are useful in managing virtual machines and containers

5. Provisioning Tools: Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation are typical examples. These tools are used to create servers, networking components, databases and all other aspects of your infrastructures.

Why is Infrastructure as Code Beneficial?

• Speed and safety: It is faster than a human clicking all around and safer since the process is automated, consistent and repeatable.

• Version control: The code can be committed to Git which is easier to revert and debug.

• Reusable: Modules can be created that can be a basis for other deployments.

• Ease: Clicking around the same thing over and over can be boring but having these as code is just easy.

It is evident that infrastructure as code is here to stay. In future posts, we will dive deep into Terraform. Feel free you ask your questions, and I will be ready to give a response as soon as possible.