1 Infrastructure as code

Infrastructure as code (IaC) is the process of automating infrastructure changes in a codified manner to achieve scalability, reliability, and security. You might feel overwhelmed in trying to automate your infrastructure while learning datacenter infrastructure concepts, public cloud offerings, container orchestrators, programming languages, and software development best practices. What do you need to know to scale infrastructure automation across a team and your organization?

This book offers a practical approach to infrastructure as code. The rate of change for infrastructure offerings continues to increase, making it difficult for any infrastructure as code tool to integrate with and support every offering. Even if you still have to execute manual steps for an infrastructure resource, this book offers some ideas on sustainably managing the resource as part of a larger, more automated system.

1.1 What is infrastructure?

1.2 What is infrastructure as code?

1.2.1 More on DevOps

1.3 What is not infrastructure as code?

1.4 Principles of infrastructure as code

1.4.1 Reproducibility

1.4.2 Idempotency

1.4.3 Composability

1.4.4 Evolvability

1.4.5 Evolvability, a complex discussion

1.5 Why use infrastructure as code?

1.5.1 Change management

1.5.2 Return on time investment

1.5.3 Knowledge sharing

1.5.4 Security

1.5.5 Insecure infrastructure in the news

1.6 Tools

1.6.1 In this book

1.6.2 Google Cloud Platform free program

1.6.3 Running examples in this book

1.6.4 Provisioning

1.6.5 Configuration management

1.6.6 More on configuration management

1.6.7 Image building

1.7 Summary