Infrastructure as Code: The Good, the Bad and the Future

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a rapidly evolving field in software engineering that aims to automate the management and setup of data centers and servers using machine-readable definition files. The concept emerged as a response to the challenges of scaling infrastructure growth, particularly with the rise of cloud computing. IaC tools like AWS CloudFormation, Ansible, Terraform, and Azure Resource Manager have become industry standards, offering benefits such as speed and cost reduction, scalability and standardization, security and documentation, and disaster recovery. However, implementing IaC also comes with limitations, including logic and conventions, maintainability and traceability, RBAC, and feature lag. To address these challenges, engineers are exploring new solutions, such as Open Policy Agents, and Internal Developer Platforms built with Platform Orchestrators, which aim to bridge the gap between developers and IaC scripts, making infrastructure setup easier to maintain and more efficient. As IaC continues to evolve, it's essential for engineering organizations to address the knowledge gap between Ops and devs to fully operationalize this approach.

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