14 Introduction to Infrastructure as Code

This chapter introduces Infrastructure as Code (IaC), the practice of managing and provisioning computing infrastructure through machine-readable definition files rather than physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools.

Learning Objectives

• Define Infrastructure as Code and its benefits (Version Control, Reproducibility)
• Differentiate between Imperative and Declarative approaches
• Learn the basics of Terraform (Providers, Resources, State)
• Understand Ansible for configuration management

Automating the Cloud

Manual configuration (“ClickOps”) is error-prone and unscalable. IaC allows developers to treat infrastructure as software—enabling code review, testing, and automated deployment of the entire data center stack.