What Is Infrastructure as Code (IaC)?
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) means you write code to create and manage your cloud infrastructure.
Infrastructure as Code simply means:
Using code to create and manage cloud resources
instead of clicking buttons on the cloud console.
Normally, to create a server or a database on AWS, you open the console and click through 10–20 screens. With IaC, you just write something like:
Example:
resource "aws_instance" "demo" {
ami = "ami-12345"
instance_type = "t2.micro"
}
Why IaC approach is good to go:
Repeatable
Consistent
Version-controlled
Automated
Error-free
Team-friendly
And this is exactly the reason DevOps engineers love IaC.
Tools Used for IaC
You’ll find many IaC tools out there, but they fall into two categories:
Multi-Cloud Tools
- Terraform ⭐ (most popular)
- Pulumi
Cloud-Specific Tools
- AWS CloudFormation, CDK, SAM
- Azure ARM, Bicep
- GCP Deployment Manager Terraform is universal, meaning it works with AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, and dozens of other platforms.
That’s why almost every DevOps roadmap begins with Terraform.
Why Do We Even Need Terraform?
Good question — because AWS already gives us a beautiful console, right?
So why write code?
To understand this, let’s imagine a very common architecture.
The Problem: Manual Infrastructure Doesn’t Scale
Let’s consider a simple 3-tier application:
- Web tier
- App tier
Database tier
To deploy this, you need to create:VPC
Subnets
EC2 instances
Auto Scaling Groups
Load Balancers
RDS Database
Route 53
Security groups
And more…
👉 Doing this manually takes ~2 hours per environment
Now multiply that:
1 Application = 6 environments
(dev, staging, prod)
2 hours × 6 = 12 hours per app
And in real companies?
They don’t run 1 or 2 apps.
They run hundreds.
This makes manual provisioning:
- Time-consuming
- Expensive
- Error-prone
- Inconsistent
- Impossible to track
Let’s break down the real-world issues 👇
Challenges of Manual Cloud Provisioning
Too slow
Teams wait for infrastructure → delayed releases.Too many people required
Hiring a large infra team = huge cost.Too many human errors
Wrong AMI, wrong subnet, wrong IP → outages.No consistency
Dev ≠ Staging ≠ Prod
This leads to the classic:
“It works on my machine!”No version control
No history, no audit, no rollback.
This is where Terraform shines.
Terraform: The Ultimate Solution
Terraform allows you to:
- Write infrastructure code once
- Reuse it for any number of environments
- Keep everything consistent
- Automate deployments
- Eliminate human errors
- Track all changes through Git
- Destroy environments automatically to save cost And all this with just a few .tf files. Terraform brings speed, safety, repeatability, and control to cloud infrastructure.
How Terraform Actually Works
Terraform uses a declarative language called HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language).
You write.tf files to describe what you want.
Example:
resource "aws_vpc" "main" {
cidr_block = "10.0.0.0/16"
}
Then you run 4 important commands:
terraform init
Downloads the provider plugins (like AWS provider).
This is always the first command.
terraform validate
Checks if your Terraform files are correct syntactically.
terraform plan
Shows a preview of:
what Terraform will create
what it will modify
what it will delete
This is like a “safety check” before deployment.
terraform apply
Actually creates infrastructure in AWS via API calls.
terraform destroy
Removes everything mentioned in your .tf files. Removes all resources defined in your Terraform project.
Useful for dev/testing environments.
Terraform + Git = Pure Magic
Using Git with Terraform gives you:
- Full version history
- Rollbacks
- Pull request approvals
- Collaboration
- Faster Approval
- CI/CD automation
Infrastructure becomes predictable, secure, and auditable.
Installing Terraform (Quick Summary)
Install using Homebrew / apt / yum / Chocolatey
Confirm using:
terraform version
Install VS Code extension → HashiCorp Terraform
Set alias tf=terraform for easy typing
You’re ready to start!
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