Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Software Platform
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An Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Software Platform is a software platform that supports the development of infrastructure management systems (that support infrastructure provisioning and configuration tasks).
- Context:
- It can automate the provisioning of cloud resources, physical servers, networking equipment, and other infrastructure components.
- It can provide version control capabilities, enabling infrastructure configurations to be tracked and managed in the same way as application code.
- It can support multi-cloud strategies, allowing infrastructure to be provisioned and managed across platforms such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
- It can reduce the risk of manual configuration errors by automating the setup and configuration of complex infrastructures.
- It can ensure consistency and repeatability in infrastructure provisioning by applying the same configuration files across different environments, such as development, staging, and production.
- It can handle the lifecycle management of infrastructure, including the creation, updating, and destruction of resources.
- It can be integrated with continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines to automatically apply infrastructure changes in response to application changes.
- It can maintain a state file that tracks the current state of infrastructure and compares it with the desired state defined in the configuration files.
- It can enable teams to collaborate on infrastructure code by providing features like access control, team management, and audit trails.
- It can be used in industries such as e-commerce, financial services, and telecommunications to automate the management of large-scale, complex infrastructures.
- ...
- Example(s):
- In 2011, AWS CloudFormation was one of the first widely adopted infrastructure as code platforms, allowing users to define cloud resources using JSON and YAML.
- In 2014, Terraform was released by HashiCorp, introducing a multi-cloud infrastructure as code platform that supports various cloud providers and enables infrastructure provisioning using HCL.
- In 2016, Azure Resource Manager became the native infrastructure as code tool for the Microsoft Azure platform, supporting JSON templates for provisioning cloud resources.
- By 2019, Google Cloud Deployment Manager allowed users to manage infrastructure resources on Google Cloud using YAML or Python templates, expanding multi-cloud and hybrid cloud use cases.
- In 2020, Pulumi introduced an infrastructure as code platform that supports writing infrastructure code in general-purpose programming languages like Python, JavaScript, and Go.
- ...
- Counter-Example(s):
- Manual Infrastructure Management, where configurations are handled through direct user interaction with physical hardware or graphical user interfaces.
- Configuration Management Tools like Ansible, which focus more on application-level configuration rather than the provisioning of infrastructure resources.
- See: Infrastructure as Code Process, Terraform Platform, CloudFormation, CI/CD, Cloud Computing