1 Infrastructure as code

If you have been working with Microsoft Azure before, you maybe have managed infrastructure in one way or another. In Azure, just as in any cloud, infrastructure can be created and altered fast and easy. Using one or more of the Azure Portal, PowerShell Cmdlets, RESTful HTTP calls, SDKs, or ARM templates, servers or application hosts are created in minutes or even seconds. This in contrast to how infrastructure was managed in the past, or often still is on-premises.

The unique proposition of the cloud has transformed the way we create and operate software this last decade. Especially the way we manage the infrastructure that runs applications has changed. Creating cloud infrastructure on-demand and disregarding it hours or days later becomes a more common approach to managing infrastructure, especially for test environments.

Two characteristics of the cloud, in particular, have accelerated this change:

1.1   Working with infrastructure

1.1.1   DevOps

1.1.2   Preventing configuration drift

1.2   The benefits of Infrastructure as Code

1.2.1   IaC allows for automation

1.2.2   IaC allows for a declarative approach

1.2.3   IaC provides a human-readable format

1.3   The Azure Resource Manager

1.3.1   Control Plane and Data Plane

1.3.2   ARM Templates

1.3.3   Project Bicep

1.3.4   Azure Service Management

1.4   Other tools

1.4.1   AWS CloudFormation

1.4.2   Google Cloud Deployment Manager

1.4.3   Terraform

1.4.4   Pulumi

1.4.5   Choosing between cloud-specific and multi-cloud solutions

1.5   Summary