Clicking through cloud consoles to create servers and networks works once. But can you recreate the same setup next month – exactly? Infrastructure as Code (IaC) describes your infrastructure in files that can be versioned, reviewed and applied automatically.
How it works
- You describe resources in code: networks, servers, databases, DNS, permissions.
- A tool compares the code with what exists.
- It creates, changes or removes resources to match.
Terraform
Terraform (and its open-source fork OpenTofu) is the most popular IaC tool. It supports AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, many European providers and hundreds of services through providers.
Other options include Bicep (Azure), Pulumi (using programming languages) and Ansible for server configuration.
Benefits
- Reproducibility: identical staging and production environments
- Reviewability: changes go through code review like application code
- Documentation: the code is an always up-to-date description of your infrastructure
- Disaster recovery: rebuild environments quickly after a failure
- Speed: new environments in minutes
Best practices
- Store state securely and lock it during changes
- Separate environments (dev, staging, production)
- Use modules for reusable components
- Never put secrets in code
- Run plans in CI and require approval before applying
- Tag resources for cost tracking
Getting started
Begin with new resources or one environment, then import existing infrastructure step by step.
We use infrastructure as code in our cloud projects, so your environment is transparent, documented and easy to reproduce.