The Benefits of Infrastructure as Code for DevOps
Before we expand on the benefits of IaC for businesses, let’s first determine the capabilities of IaC for DevOps so you can understand exactly how it works.
Automated Infrastructure Deployment
So, as we’ve found out, thanks to IaC, DevOps teams can deploy entire infrastructure stacks with a few lines of code. This means they don’t have to spend hours manually configuring servers, networks, and databases but rather define everything in tools like Terraform or AWS CloudFormation.
One command can spin up hundreds of perfectly configured resources across multiple cloud providers. This is how you save your organization from human error and speed up deployment from days to mere minutes.
Version Control for Infrastructure
Every infrastructure change can be tracked in version control systems like Git. This way, everyone will see who modified the infrastructure, what changes were made, and their reasoning behind every change. Furthermore, engineers can quickly roll back to the last known working configuration with newfound ease. Such systems provide a complete audit trail that makes troubleshooting more efficient.
Consistent Environments
It’s quite common for development teams to deal with environment inconsistencies. However, IaC ensures that every environment is configured with the same code. Thus, developers can write code in the development environment, knowing that it will work in production with no issues. This saves teams countless hours that would typically be spent debugging environment-specific problems.
Rapid Recovery
And when systems face any issues, teams no longer need to manually recreate the servers but return to a good state with the help of, again, IaC. It makes disaster recovery a repeatable process. This is a significant plus when it comes to emergency situations since, otherwise, you’d have to deal with a stressful manual operation. But with IaC, recovery times drop from hours to minutes.