Infrastructure as Code contributes greatly to meeting the demands of agile software development. Using pre-configured scripts, necessary changes to the infrastructure can be made at a rate which you simply cannot achieve through manual administration. These adjustments can be made in the middle of the night, on weekends and even on public holidays. This also reduces the potential for human error, especially for administrative tasks which have to be frequently repeated, because it is no longer possible to make input or typing errors. In addition to being fast and less error prone, Infrastructure as Code offers the following advantages over manual administration:
- High efficiency: IaC allows you to automate most of resource management and thus greatly contributes to optimizing the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), or in other words, the entire development process.
- Reusability: Once the code has been written for an infrastructure, it can be executed at any time and as often as required to deploy that infrastructure. The same also applies, for example, to sandbox environments in the development stage(s).
- Version control: If there is code, it is possible to have version control. Infrastructure as Code thus enables any changes made to an infrastructure to be tracked and documented. One of the advantages of this is that a previous set-up can easily be restored.
- Minimization of costs/effort: Automating infrastructure management saves a lot of time and money which could be better used for other things.
However, this last advantage does have its limits. When it comes to a properly programmed Infrastructure-as-Code environment, this advantage holds true. However, you should not underestimate the amount of effort that goes into its design and implementation. For many administrators involved, the IaC model implies there will be major changes. After all, you need a comprehensive understanding ofcloud architecture concepts, experience with APIs and knowledge of programming languages such as Java, Node.js and Python (to name but a few) if you want to be able to switch to an automated infrastructure or implement one. Therefore, you must be prepared for comparatively high costs and a lot of training in the beginning.