The practice of managing and provisioning computing infrastructure through machine-readable definition files rather than physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools. IaC enables infrastructure to be versioned, tested, and deployed using the same methodologies applied to software development.

Benefits and Advantages

Infrastructure as Code provides consistency, repeatability, and scalability in infrastructure management. It eliminates configuration drift, reduces manual errors, and enables rapid environment provisioning. IaC also supports disaster recovery by allowing entire infrastructures to be recreated from code repositories.

Popular IaC Tools

Common IaC tools include Terraform for multi-cloud infrastructure provisioning, AWS CloudFormation for Amazon Web Services, and Ansible for configuration management. These tools use declarative languages to describe desired infrastructure states, automatically handling the complexity of resource creation, modification, and dependency management.