What is Infrastructure as Code? and the difference of IaC Tools

With the below Infrastructure as Code video you'll get a good overview of what Infrastructure as Code is and how the IaC tools differ from each other.

What is Infrastructure as Code?

To understand the Infrastructure as Code concept better, I explain how DevOps tasks were done

• before automation and
• after automation.

DevOps tasks BEFORE automation

Before automation you were doing everything by hand :

• setup servers
• configure networking
• install and configure software
• etc.

In addition to that all the tasks needed to be done for multiple environments like DEV, TEST and PROD environment.

DevOps tasks AFTER automation

Now, Infrastructure as Code is a way to automate all these DevOps tasks end to end instead of doing it manually.
All the knowledge and expertise of system administrators or DevOps engineers are packed into programs and applications that carry out those tasks.

So, Infrastructure as Code or IaC is a concept and there are Infrastructure as Code tools, like Ansible, Puppet, Terraform or Cloudformation etc that you can use for different tasks.

Difference of Infrastructure as Code tools

Why do we have so many different tools, can't we just use one IaC tool?

Well, no. Because no tool can do everything and each one is great in a specific area. IaC tools automate tasks in different categories for different phases:

3 main task categories:

• infrastructure provisioning
• configuration of provisioned infrastructure
• deployment of application

Distinction of phases:

• initial setup phase
• maintaining phase

So, in most cases you would use a combination of 2 or more IaC tools.

Distinction in how they work

Moreover, the IaC tools differ in the way HOW they work:

• declarative vs procedural
• mutable vs immutable
• agent vs agentless

Watch the full video here

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