Benefits of implementing IaC - AWS Prescriptive Guidance

Benefits of implementing IaC

By choosing the right IaC tool for your organization, you can achieve the following benefits:

  • Speed – One goal of IaC is to make things faster by eliminating manual processes. A code-based approach makes it easier to get more done in less time. Manually setting up each IT environment is very expensive and requires dedicated engineers and architects for setting up the hardware and software. By increasing speed, organizations are better able to adapt quickly to changing customer needs and market conditions. It also allows you to write your IaC code once and deploy that same code to hundreds of environments in a fraction of the time that it would take you to create them manually.

  • Scalability – IaC makes it easier to add resources to existing infrastructure. Upgrades are provisioned quickly so that you can rapidly expand during peak usage periods. For example, organizations running online services can scale up to keep up with user demands during high-demand periods, such as Black Friday.

  • Enhanced security – IaC excels at enabling security and compliance for organizations. Organizations are able to set baseline security policies and configurations and enforce them through pipelines by running automated tests against your IaC. If the IaC violates compliance rules, the pipeline fails and automatically provides feedback back to the developer. This can prevent the creation of unsecure infrastructure.

  • Consistency – Consistency is another vital benefit of IaC. When multiple engineers are manually deploying configurations, inconsistencies are inevitable. Over time, it becomes difficult to track and reproduce the same environments. These inconsistencies often lead to critical differences between development, QA, and production environments.

  • Efficiency – IaC improves efficiency and productivity across the development lifecycle. Programmers create sandbox environments to develop in isolation. Operations can quickly provision infrastructure for security tests. QA engineers have exact copies of the production environments during testing. When they're ready to deploy, developers push both infrastructure and code to production in one step. It can also allow for a higher level of collaboration and teamwork. Teams can create secure patterns for applications and then share those templates or constructs with other teams, which reduces duplicative work.

  • Reduced costs – IaC reduces the costs of developing software. There is no need to spend resources on setting up environments manually. You only pay for the resources you are actively using, so there is no unnecessary overhead.

  • Improved reliability – If your infrastructure is large, it becomes easy to misconfigure a resource or provision services in the wrong order. With IaC, the resources are always provisioned and configured exactly as declared. Because creating resources manually is error prone, you can have a high degree of confidence that your infrastructure will be created as intended when using IaC.

  • Configuration drift detection – Configuration drift occurs when the configuration that provisioned your environment no longer matches the actual environment. Many IaC tools help you detect drift and remediate it. For example, if someone incorrectly modifies your resources manually, you can use the IaC tool to detect what was changed and restore it to the intended state.

  • Experimentation – Because IaC makes provisioning new infrastructure so much faster and easier, you can make and test experimental changes without investing lots of time and resources. If you like the results, you can quickly scale up the new infrastructure for production.