Infrastructure as Code

'Infrastructure as Code' is the practice of keeping infrastructure topology specified in documents and stored in version control … in a similar fashion to the way developers manage code / deploy solutions. This will involve using DevOps tooling and so enables consistency, quality, and accountability.

Using this approach, organisations can quickly create / delete infrastructure on demand – useful for dev/test environments where you want to provision an environment to do testing, and once completed then destroy it to avoid unnecessary costs.

Azure provides native tooling for infrastructure as code – namely ARM / Bicep templates and Bash/PowerShell scripts using the Management API.

Alternatively, several cloud / technology agnostic tools are available including Terraform, Ansible, Chef, Puppet, others.

✦ https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/devops/learn/what-is-infrastructure-as-code
✦ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/azure/azure-resource-manager/templates/overview
✦ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/azure/azure-resource-manager/bicep/overview