Fundamentals of DevOps and Software Delivery

Chapter 2. How to Manage Your Infrastructure as Code

In Chapter 1, you learned how to deploy your app by using PaaS and IaaS, but it required a lot of manual steps clicking around a web UI. This is fine while you’re learning and experimenting, but managing everything at a company this way—sometimes called ClickOps—quickly leads to problems:

Deployments are slow and tedious

You can’t deploy frequently or respond to problems or opportunities quickly.

Deployments are error prone and inconsistent

You end up with lots of bugs, outages, and late-night debugging sessions. You become fearful and slow to introduce new features.

Only one person knows how to deploy

That person is overloaded and never has time for long-term improvements. If they were to leave or get hit by a bus, everything would grind to a halt.¹

Fortunately, these days, there is a better way to do things: you can manage your infrastructure as code (IaC). Instead of clicking around manually, you use code to define, deploy, update, and destroy your infrastructure. This represents a key insight of DevOps: most tasks that you used to do manually can now be automated using code, as shown in Table 2-1.

Table 2-1. A key insight of DevOps is that you can manage almost everything as code

Task	How to manage as code	Example	Chapter
Provision servers	Provisioning tools	Use OpenTofu to deploy a server	This chapter
Configure servers	Server templating tools	Use Packer to create an image of a server	This chapter
Configure ...