Model-Driven DevOps: Increasing agility and security in your physical network through DevOps

Chapter 4

Infrastructure as Code

In the preceding chapter, you learned how to make infrastructure consumable via APIs and platforms to reduce the complexity of automation. With consumable infrastructure as its foundation, this chapter introduces the concept of infrastructure as code (IaC) and illustrates how it can largely be viewed as a data movement, translation, and validation exercise rather than a programming exercise. The many code snippets in this and the following chapter help illustrate the concepts that we are presenting. They are simplified versions of a more complete reference implementation presented in Chapter 6, “Implementation,” which is also available via GitHub.

Compliance Is a Dirty Word

It was Monday, and Bob was sitting ...