Infrastructure as Code

Managing a server is a huge responsibility. One needs to carefully curate their critical systems and ensure the business runs smoothly by their continued function. You might’ve heard about new ways of managing environments like DevOps or Site Reliability Engineering. In today's world, many applications are quite complex. They need different components like a load balancer, web servers, database servers, and systems to process tasks in a queue. It takes a lot of time to set them up and manage them. Infrastructure as code (IaC) makes this process much faster and easier! A framework like Chef, Ansible, AWS CloudFormation, or Puppet is commonly utilised to determine their infrastructure. The tool used isn’t unimportant because they all work similarly. Each allows a developer to define a computer system or network of computer systems necessary to run and support their code. With IaC, developers can define the basic elements needed for their application. Instead of manually setting up each component, the IaC framework takes care of it automatically. This means that what used to take hours can now be done in just a few minutes! The IaC framework creates the right environment for the application by putting together all the necessary pieces. There are two ways to approach IaC: declarative or imperative. A declarative approach defines the system’s desired state, including what resources you need and any properties they should have, and an IaC tool will configure it for you. An imperative approach instead defines the specific commands needed to achieve the desired configuration, and those commands then need to be executed in the correct order. In simpler terms, IaC is like having a blueprint for building an application's infrastructure. Instead of constructing each part by hand, the IaC framework does it for you, saving time and effort