12 Examples of Infrastructure As Code

John Spacey, updated on November 02, 2017

Infrastructure as code is the automation of IT infrastructure. Historically, infrastructure such as servers were deployed and managed by specialists who configured things manually. This doesn't work in a cloud environment where servers have to be configured and deployed on the fly. Infrastructure as code evolved as a way to manage large scale infrastructure resources in an environment of constant change that requires operational stability. The following are illustrative examples of infrastructure as code designed to show why manual infrastructure configuration is prohibitively inefficient for a modern IT platform.

Deployment

Deploying a change to a platform that is currently running on 400 production servers.

Monitoring

Monitoring user experience such as response times across a cloud platform where users are connecting to different machines in different data centers.

Incident Management

Identifying a production problem and correlating it to a server, set of servers or a particular type of configuration.

Configuration Management

Keeping an accurate history of configurations across complex environments.

Rollback

Reverting a large number of servers back to a historical configuration.

Security

Applying a security fix to a device driver on thousands of servers running different systems and applications sponsored by different business units.

Administration

Automating cumbersome administrative tasks such as daily backups across a large number of devices.

Alerts

Generating and handling alerts. For example, a large telecom company might receive thousands of alerts every few minutes and they need to automatically figure out which indicate a problem that actually impacts customers or end-users.

Provisioning

A data center needs to quickly change the linux version on 50 physical machines to meet customer demand.

Capacity

An internet service needs to balance load across 7 data centers.

Resilience

A cloud service has an average of 7 servers fail in various ways each day. This needs to be immediately detected and handled by redirecting load to working servers.

Disaster Recovery

A cold backup site needs to be continuously synced with production.

Overview: Infrastructure As Code
Type	Cloud Computing
Definition	The automation of IT infrastructure deployment, monitoring and management.
Notes	In the past, infrastructure teams were mostly specialists in hardware and operating systems who focused on connecting and configuring things. Infrastructure as code represents a shift towards having infrastructure managed by developers.
Related Concepts	Cloud Computing » Automation » IT Infrastructure » Servers » DevOps » Incident Management »