Infrastructure as Code (IaC) in CI/CD

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the practice of managing and provisioning computing infrastructure through machine-readable definition files, rather than physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools. Tools like Terraform, Ansible, and AWS CloudFormation allow you to define your servers, load balancers, databases, and network configurations in code. Integrating IaC into your CI/CD pipeline brings the same benefits to your infrastructure as it does to your application code: automation, consistency, and versioning. Instead of manually setting up a new staging environment, you can run a pipeline job that executes a Terraform or Ansible script to provision the entire environment automatically. This ensures that your staging and production environments are identical, eliminating a common source of bugs. It also makes it easy to create temporary environments for testing pull requests and then tear them down afterward to save costs. By storing your infrastructure definitions in a Git repository, you get a full history of all changes, the ability to review changes through pull requests, and the power to easily roll back to a previous known-good configuration if a change causes problems. This approach treats infrastructure with the same rigor as application code, making your entire system more resilient, scalable, and manageable.