Infrastructure as Code

Chapter 1. Challenges and Principles

The new generation of infrastructure management technologies promises to transform the way we manage IT infrastructure. But many organizations today aren’t seeing any dramatic differences, and some are finding that these tools only make life messier. As we’ll see, infrastructure as code is an approach that provides principles, practices, and patterns for using these technologies effectively.

Why Infrastructure as Code?

Virtualization, cloud, containers, server automation, and software-defined networking should simplify IT operations work. It should take less time and effort to provision, configure, update, and maintain services. Problems should be quickly detected and resolved, and systems should all be consistently configured and up to date. IT staff should spend less time on routine drudgery, having time to rapidly make changes and improvements to help their organizations meet the ever-changing needs of the modern world.

But even with the latest and best new tools and platforms, IT operations teams still find that they can’t keep up with their daily workload. They don’t have the time to fix longstanding problems with their systems, much less revamp them to make the best use of new tools. In fact, cloud and automation often makes things worse. The ease of provisioning new infrastructure leads to an ever-growing portfolio of systems, and it takes an ever-increasing amount of time just to keep everything from collapsing.

Adopting cloud and ...