Fundamentals of DevOps and Software Delivery

Chapter 2. How to Manage Your Infrastructure as Code

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In Chapter 1, you learned how to deploy your app 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 if you manage everything at a company this way—what’s sometimes called ClickOps—it quickly leads to problems:

Deployments are slow and tedious

So you can’t deploy too often.

Deployments are error-prone

So you end up with lots of bugs, outages, and late-night debugging sessions.

Only one person knows how to deploy

So that person is overloaded, they never have time for long-term improvements, and 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. ...