Infrastructure as code is the process of provisioning and managing your cloud resources by writing a template file that is both human readable, and machine consumable. Infrastructure as code brings a lot of benefits:
Visibility: An infrastructure as code template serves as a very clear reference of what resources are on your account, and what their settings are. You don’t have to navigate to the web console to check the parameters.
Stability: If you accidentally change the wrong setting or delete the wrong resource in the web console you can break things. Infrastructure as code helps solve this, especially when it is combined with version control, such as Git.
Scalability: With infrastructure as code you can write it once and then reuse it many times. This means that one well written template can be used as the basis for multiple services, in multiple regions around the world, making it much easier to horizontally scale.
Security: Once again infrastructure as code gives you a unified template for how to deploy your architecture. If you create one well-secured architecture you can reuse it multiple times, and know that each deployed version is following the same settings.
