Level Up: Infrastructure As Code

Level 0: What it is and why you should care.

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon from Pexels

What is Infrastructure as Code?

Infrastructure as Code (or IaC) is a process by which you can manage and provision the infrastructure your code will run on using machine-readable, committable, reviewable configuration files.

Why Infrastructure as Code?

In the beginning, there were servers: actual physical machines that existed in the real world as objects. You could touch them. They lived in a data centre across town, a dingy basement, or, if you were really unlucky, a cupboard shared with the cleaner. If you wanted to install or update something you had to connect to the physical machine over the network or a serial interface. If you wanted to increase the RAM or disk-space, you had to go across town, or down to the aforementioned dingy basement, or go to the cleaning cupboard — dodging the bucket and mop — and open the machine up.

Now, of course, like many other things which used to be physical objects, servers are a thing of the past!

Just kidding, of course they’re not, but we live in an age where the complexities of their physical management — which hopefully don’t involve dodging buckets and mops in 2021— are delegated to a handful of cloud…