Infrastructure as Code

IaC treats infrastructure — servers, networks, load balancers, databases — as software. Infrastructure is defined in version-controlled code files that can be reviewed, tested, and deployed consistently. Tools like Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, Ansible, and Pulumi enable IaC. Benefits include consistency (eliminating configuration drift), speed (spin up environments in minutes), and reproducibility (identical dev/staging/production environments). IaC is a foundational DevOps practice that enables continuous delivery, disaster recovery, and scaling. It's closely related to GitOps, where Git is the single source of truth for infrastructure state.