Traditional IT infrastructure management in data centres involves manual processes. System admins and engineers configure the servers in manual mode to meet the application and OS requirements. The process was always error-prone, inefficient, time-consuming and costly. With infrastructure moving to the cloud, such manual configurations become untenable. Infrastructure components have grown in number, with several applications released to production daily. Organisations now look at Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to cope with the increased load and manage the infrastructure. 

 IaC entails managing and provisioning infrastructure through code. Developers create configuration files containing infrastructure specifications. They run the code instead of grappling with hardware settings or configuration tools. The approach relies on automation and remote provisioning. 

The advantages

IaC offers several benefits over the traditional manual provisioning, configuring, and managing infrastructure.

1. Cost and speed benefits

Traditional IT infrastructure management is costly and time-consuming. The enterprise has to hire professionals to perform tedious and complex provisioning tasks. Each professional can only work so much during a shift. Large large enterprises with multiple applications must hire many engineers, adding to the cost. Also, manual configurations take time. The enterprise loses much-needed scalability, especially during peak hours. Often, application deployments get held up while waiting for the infrastructure. The process soon becomes unviable.

IaC automates and speeds up infrastructure configuration and deployment, and enables enterprises to cope with today’s complex infrastructure. Automation extends to virtualisation, user account management, network management, and everything else. Even minor operations, such as adding or shutting down resources, get automated. 

IaC offers:

• System admins and engineers a template for provisioning, saving them time and effort. They no longer need to provision and manage servers and other infrastructure each time they develop or deploy an application. They only need to execute a script and have the infrastructure ready. The time saved enables them to focus more on other mission-critical tasks. 
• Standardised logs for all processes during the building stage. The detailed reports and documentation make explicit the details of infrastructure deployment. New employees may take over without disruption.

2. Consistency

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) makes provisioning infrastructure across multiple environments consistent. 

Manual infrastructure deployment requires maintaining deployment environment settings individually. In such situations, each environment tends to develop a unique configuration. When system admins try replicating a configuration in another environment, they face roadblocks. Issues such as configuration drift and missing dependencies often manifest. Such errors are hard to track. It wastes considerable time and effort and attracts significant opportunity costs. 

IaC enforces consistency through codes that represent the desired environment states. It becomes easy to replicate configuration and prevent runtime issues. The changes made to the source code apply across all release pipelines. A given operation always produces the same result. 

IaC enables:

• Identical environments. Often integration and staging environments do not mimic the production environment. Automated code makes it easy to build identical environments, doing away with the issue.
• Stability. IaC makes the development environment stable. Development teams may use IaC to configure environments according to their specifications. They can prevent incompatibilities caused by configuration drift or missing dependencies with ease.
• Preventing configuration drift. IaC codes are immutable, with every component built according to specifications. The first deployment is the actual deployment. Later deployments have no effect. With the environment configuration specifications already in the code, changes in run time have no effect.  

3. Resiliency

Manual configuration comes with a high risk of human errors and mistakes. As such, system admins tend to push back against even the most minor changes. The possibility of corrupted backups and servers crashing makes them live in perpetual fear.

IaC makes it easy to make changes fast as the infrastructure needs evolve. System admins can make changes with the confidence to recreate a working environment. They may remove variables, tweak configuration settings, and roll back any change if things go wrong.  

IaC makes it easy to:

• Apply version control for infrastructure, making tracking and rolling back changes easier if needed.
• Divide the infrastructure into modular components and combine modules in many ways. 
• Transition among clouds. Transiting a script from one cloud provider to another becomes simple. In manual mode, developers often had to recreate the entire environment. 
• Enable disaster recovery. Most disaster recovery plans require the ability to set up an alternate environment in a different data centre or region. IaC offers an easy way to create a new environment from scratch.

4. Visibility and easy troubleshooting

As organisations grow over time, the infrastructure environment expands. For instance, an AWS Org may have many accounts using multiple services in different regions. Soon, it becomes difficult for anyone to map the deployment or provisioning. When such a maze extends to the cloud, troubleshooting becomes time-consuming and expensive.

IaC code offers a single source of truth. System admins do not have to waste time exploring and enumerating everything in the environment. Instead, auditing the IaC scripts makes the task fast and delivers sizable cost savings. When confronted with errors, developers need to look no further than the source code to troubleshoot. 

IaC brings:

• Traceability to infrastructure management. Complete visibility makes explicit the changes, including who made the changes and who has access. 
• Root cause analysis. IaC tools also come with continuous monitoring and reporting, making identifying any issue’s root cause easy.
• The integrity of the infrastructure management process. The visibility of the IaC scripts provides insights into the things provisioned.

The challenges

The benefits of Infrastructure as Code notwithstanding, several challenges inhibit widespread adoption.

One significant challenge is the steep learning curve. IaC uses languages such as JSON, Ruby, and YAML. Most enterprise teams are unfamiliar with these languages concepts. Many of them, working under tight declines and with resource constraints, do not have the luxury to learn. Also, with the ongoing talent crunch showing no signs of abating, such competencies are costly and hard to get. 

With IaC, the configuration files come under source control like other software source codes. While this makes troubleshooting easy, the code may contain errors and take significant time and effort to debug. Testing IaC code can be challenging, especially with large infrastructure environments. It is not easy to create test environments that represent production environments. There have been instances of IaC leading to longer deployment times. 

IaC codes often rely on third-party libraries, APIs, and other dependencies. Managing these dependencies can be challenging and need extra effort.

IaC can also introduce security risks. For instance, storing access in the code could expose it to unauthorised users and increase the risk of a breach. IaC requires proper code management and the adoption of robust code security protocols.

Legacy security tools and processes might not suffice in a new IaC environment. It might take several iterations, new governance guardrails, and new investments to get legacy security tools tuned to IaC. IaC enables continuous monitoring, but these need additional tracking tools.

Considering these challenges, many developers continue with manual processes. They prefer the known inefficiency to disruptive change that may yield little immediate benefits.

IaC tools

The popularity of IaC has led to the emergence of several facilitating tools. Development teams can use server automation and configuration management tools to achieve IaC. There are also dedicated solutions for IaC that makes the task even easier. One of the popular options is AWS, which offers a DevOps-focused way of creating and maintaining infrastructure. These tools reduce the learning curve, enable automation, ease testing, and make it easy to deploy IaC code. AWS CloudFormation enables the provisioning of operating systems and network devices. The tool also deploys applications and manages configuration. 

The benefits of IaC outweigh the challenges for large enterprises with complex infrastructure. IaC works well for smaller enterprises as well, but they may assess the pros and cons of IaC from the perspective of their enterprise.