Infrastructure as Code : Best Practices, Benefits & Examples

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a method to define and manage infrastructure using code. It enables easy provisioning of new environments or scaling existing ones, tracking changes in the infrastructure, detecting and correcting environment drift, automating infrastructure deployments, testing applications in production-like environments early in development cycles, and improving productivity by holding everything together in version control systems. IaC can be used with various tools such as Terraform, Pulumi, ARM templates, Bicep, CloudFormation, CDK, Ansible, Chef, Salt, and Puppet. These tools use either declarative or imperative approaches to define the infrastructure. The choice of tool depends on factors like engineering capability, cloud platform usage, and support for CI/CD platforms.