Glossary

Infrastructure as Code is a method of managing infrastructure that’s been modernized to take best advantage of cloud computing. It uses the most significant innovation of cloud computing, the ability to dynamically provision, create, and destroy servers, to solve many of the issues plaguing previous infrastructure practices.

At its most abstract, IaC gives a statement in code of what the infrastructure to run a particular application should look like. It is essentially a file that contains the proper infrastructure set up on it. Since computers are so adept at following instructions exactly the same way every time, IaC allows your team to create many, identical servers quickly and easily.

With cloud computing allowing for dynamic provisioning of servers, IaC allows for the destruction of old servers and the expedient recreation of new ones according to the IaC instruction file. Because of the speed and consistency of this process, IaC is highly scalable and facilitates complex application ecosystems full of microservices.

Since IaC is a broad category with many practices under its umbrella, there are also more minute differences, such as the use of immutable servers to prevent problematic configuration drift.

Infrastructure as Code has a number of benefits beyond scalability. Since the configuration infrastructure is a file, these can be easily stored and versioned. This versioning greatly helps with legal compliance and auditing since your team will have the same ease of access to the exact server configuration from six months ago as they have to the current server configuration.

Not only does versioning help with legal compliance, it’s also an important recovery tool. In an age where fast-paced teams constantly push new features, it’s impossible to foresee or prevent every possible bug or error from making its way into production. Rather, having usable version histories allows teams to revert to previous functional builds expediently, minimizing the costs associated with application downtimes.