5 Things to Know About Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Managing physical digital infrastructure demands a significant amount of time, money, knowledge, and communication. As technology has evolved and cloud technologies have become ubiquitous, more efficient approaches have emerged to improve infrastructure management. 

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) was created to help organizations build, deploy, and manage their compute resources more efficiently. Here are 5 things to know about Infrastructure as Code: 

1. What Is Infrastructure as Code?

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is an innovative approach to managing infrastructure resources — such as networks, virtual machines, and load balancers. By using code rather than manual processes, IT teams can deploy workloads, implement faster updates, create automation for their ongoing improvements, and more. 

2. Why Is IaC Necessary?

While in the process of implementing digital transformation strategies, some organizations discover that they lack the agility necessary to achieve their goals. The problem — for organizations of all sizes and IT backgrounds — frequently lies within the processes they have in place to manage and replicate the infrastructure that supports application environments. 

While these processes have lagged behind the techniques used for iterative software development, IaC promises to revolutionize how organizations deploy their infrastructure resources. IaC is necessary to help businesses achieve their goals through more efficient infrastructure management, development, and automation. 

3. What Are the Benefits?

IaC can benefit your organization in a number of ways, including: 

• Access to previous information. Implementing an IaC approach to provision resources ensures critical infrastructure knowledge will remain easily accessible, which can help your organization avoid skill gaps during employee transitions or a loss of other documentation. 

• Cost reduction. By reducing the time, effort, and expertise needed to provision infrastructure, organizations can utilize their cloud resources and IT personnel more effectively.

• Error reduction. With IaC, when changes need to be made, IT teams have the ability to make the changes to the source code rather than the environment itself, reducing the chance for long-term errors that could impact the infrastructure. 

• Increased development. IaC allows software developers to quickly provision new environments, allowing development cycles to be drastically reduced and developments to occur faster than ever before. 

• Scalability. By automating infrastructure provisioning with IaC, your organization can maximize the value of the cloud’s scalability and elasticity.

With IaC, your organization can utilize your IT resources more efficiently. 

4. How Does IaC Enhance DevSecOps?

DevSecOps teams are often responsible for ensuring the functionality, improvements, and ongoing security of application deployments. IaC is a valuable tool for DevOps, as they aim to release updates in the shortest amount of time while maintaining security and efficiency. 

IaC is a powerful tool for DevSecOps teams who practice continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD), which requires them to consistently test, integrate, and deploy improvements throughout the application lifecycle. 

5. What Are the Potential Challenges of IaC?

While IaC provides a number of benefits to DevSecOps teams and organizations, there are still some potential challenges, including: 

• Error duplication. While it’s possible to have access to previous information, an old error, if unnoticed, can make its way into updated code, causing long-term issues for the infrastructure. 

• Inaccurate planning. Without accurate planning, your IaC strategy may not have the ability to be properly carried out. 

• Lack of expertise. While IaC decreases physical management, a significant amount of knowledge around code and digital infrastructure management is necessary for an efficient, long-term management solution. 

While these challenges are possible, your organization can avoid them by ensuring accurate plans are in place, maintaining consistent management of the infrastructure, and partnering with cloud computing professionals. 

Effectively Implement IaC at Your Organization

When properly strategized and carried out, Infrastructure as Code allows members of your organization’s team to focus on continuous infrastructure improvements, rather than being specifically focused on implementation. 

However, it’s important to note that not every DevOps team has the knowledge, tools, or resources in place to implement this innovative strategy. By choosing a partner with extensive experience deploying cloud-based infrastructure, you can take the first steps toward leaving certain infrastructure challenges behind. 

Ready to optimize your organization’s own IaC strategy and get ahead of the digital curve? Contact a cloud expert today!