Glossary Term

Infrastructure as Code

Updated · 1 min read

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) treats servers, networks, databases, and load balancers as software: version-controlled, peer-reviewed, and deployed through automated pipelines. Instead of clicking through a cloud console, you declare the desired state of your infrastructure and let the tool calculate and apply the diff.

Declarative vs Imperative

Most modern IaC tools are declarative — you describe what you want, not how to get there. Terraform computes a plan; CloudFormation generates a changeset; Pulumi diffs a graph. The tool handles ordering, dependencies, and rollback.

  • Terraform — Cloud-agnostic HCL, state-based reconciliation, massive provider ecosystem
  • AWS CloudFormation — Native AWS, deep service integration, no state file to manage
  • Pulumi — General-purpose languages (TypeScript, Python, Go) instead of DSLs
  • Ansible — Agentless configuration management, strong for OS-level provisioning

Key Benefits

IaC eliminates configuration drift between environments, makes disaster recovery fully reproducible, enables peer review of infrastructure changes via pull requests, and provides a complete audit trail through version control history.

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