The Benefits Of Infrastructure As Code

Simply put, IaC is the process of managing your IT infrastructure using configuration files. You’re basically treating your servers, databases, networks, and other infrastructure like software. And this code can help you configure and deploy these infrastructure components quickly and consistently.

IaC helps you automate the infrastructure deployment process in a repeatable, consistent manner, which has many benefits including:

• Reduced human error and future proofing
• Repeatability and consistency
• Disaster recovery
• Improved auditability

Reduced Human Error and Future Proofing

IaC and automation reduce human error by creating predictable results. You can produce new environments to test infrastructure upgrades to validate changes without impacting production. If you want to apply changes to infrastructure across multiple environments, using code reduces errors because focus and attention to detail are less impacted by repetitive manual work.

IaC also helps to reduce single points of failure against talent loss or tech progress by documenting the infrastructure. In other words, the code and comments increase awareness about the design and configuration of infrastructure. They help with training as well, reducing the need for subject matter experts to get developers up to speed.

Repeatability and Consistency

The repeatability of IaC helps you create consistent infrastructure in other regions much more rapidly. This feature frees up time to move on to the next set of problems, such as how to route traffic to applications throughout the region and how to test failover without impacts on production.

Disaster Recovery

How long does it take to rebuild a container image in an emergency (e.g., deploy new code to address an application outage or degradation)? If you’re using manual processes or complex chains of tooling, then that disaster recovery (DR) process will take longer. The reliability of an application is impacted by the ability to pivot and the speed to redeploy. Be sure you know what that process looks like and how to put in place the right practice, tooling, and underlying processes to make a Kubernetes deployment as straightforward as possible.

Improved Auditability

IaC also helps track changes to an audit infrastructure. Because your infrastructure is represented in code, commits to your Git repository reflect who, when, and why changes were made. You’ll be able to look at the code and know how environments were built, what’s happening, and why.

Cost savings

Automating the infrastructure deployment process allows engineers to spend less time performing manual work, and more time executing higher-value tasks. Because of this increased productivity, your company can save money on hiring costs and engineers’ salaries.

Conclusion

Infrastructure as Code can simplify and accelerate your infrastructure provisioning process, help you avoid mistakes and comply with policies, keep your environments consistent, and save your company a lot of time and money. Your engineers can be more productive on focus on higher-value tasks. And you can better serve your customers.

If IaC isn’t something you’re doing now, maybe it’s time to start!

If you would like to speak to AltoStack on how Infrastructure as Code can help avoid cloud deployment inconsistencies, increase developer productivity, and lower costs please contact us here.