Top 7 Business Benefits of Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Infrastructure as code (IaC) refers to the practice of managing and provisioning computing infrastructure through machine-readable definition files rather than physical hardware configuration or manual processes. It applies software development principles to infrastructure management, resulting in greater efficiency, consistency, and scalability.

Investing in solid infrastructure as code practices is no small investment. The steepness of the learning curve also varies across different IaC tools. The benefits must be worth the investment of money and time.

These benefits include the ability to scale your compute resources in and out automatically, cost savings from not having to pay for overprovisioned hardware running in your closet, and pushing massive security processes to the underlying cloud provider.

Multiple environment complexity

Running production-level workloads in the cloud is complex. It’s not a problem if you are running a single web application on an EC2 instance behind a load balancer. But it’s very different when you are running a web application, a database, a Kubernetes cluster, and some serverless functions to support all your application’s services.

That problem is exacerbated if you need to run many environments. Think about your development, staging, and production environments. You have to provision and maintain all that infrastructure manually, which is a massive burden and time commitment.

This complexity is why IaC is critical. Depending on your chosen tool, you can represent all that infrastructure as a single module in code. When you want another environment, you add another instance of it with your new environment name. None of the work involved in creating the module has to be repeated — like DRY for your infrastructure.

Configuration visibility

IaC is also important for visibility.

With IaC, anyone with access to the code has visibility into the current configuration because it’s represented in code and committed to a source code repository. Changes to the infrastructure configuration go through a pull request review. With pull requests, everyone can see what is changing and why.

The two most important reasons why IaC is important are improved complexity management and increased visibility into infrastructure configuration.

When implementing infrastructure as code inside your organization, you could face the following challenges:

• State management: Most IaC tools are stateful, and taking care of the state files is your organization’s responsibility. Ensure you take advantage of the remote state with backups in play and a locking mechanism to prevent concurrent operations.
• Secrets management: Building infrastructure usually means you will have many secrets to keep. Use an external Vault service, and ensure your secrets are rotated periodically.
• Vendor lock-in: You should try to avoid vendor lock-in in case your organization needs to migrate to a different cloud. To avoid having to learn multiple tools, use tools that support different cloud providers, such as OpenTofu, Terraform, and Pulumi.
• Scaling challenges: When you scale, things become very difficult for IaC. You need to keep your state files small, but you also need to be able to create dependencies between them and share outputs. This is where infrastructure orchestration products such as Spacelift come into play.
• Governance: IaC doesn’t come packed with governance, so you need to use a policy–as-code tool such as OPA to reduce costs and the chance of human error. To reduce vulnerabilities, use security vulnerability scanning tools such as Checkov or KICS.
• Speed vs. control paradox: IaC requires moving fast while staying in control. You need to build self-service templates, ensure RBAC is enabled, and take advantage of ephemeral environments.

We’ve outlined the benefits of IaC for engineering teams, but a product manager might not consider these as advancing solutions for their users. The benefits of investing time and other resources in IaC can seem opaque to someone who is focused on product end users rather than the underlying infrastructure.

The advantages of infrastructure as code for someone in a product role are benefits the entire organization can realize:

1. Decreased risk
2. Stable environments for faster deployments
3. Cost optimization
4. Self-documenting code
5. Automation
6. Scalability
7. Consistent configurations

1. Decreased risk

Provisioning all your infrastructure by hand is risky. It requires error-prone manual work that may be the responsibility of one person — who could take all that knowledge with them if they leave the company. IaC minimizes both of these risks. Representing infrastructure as reproducible blocks of code is far less error-prone than doing it manually. IaC lives in a source code repository. Its history and changes are visible to everyone on the team. 

2. Stable environments for faster deployment

Configuring or modifying environments manually slows down product development. This is especially true if the intent is to change the product architecture to better serve its users. 

IaC environments are stable, consistent, and easily modifiable. They live in code alongside the product, so you can change both at the same time. This harmony means that new product features can be developed faster. Managing a given environment involves less overhead.

3. Cost optimization

When all resources are represented in code you can see what is running and what shouldn’t be. Optimizing cost maintains product profit margins, and IaC makes those optimizations much easier.

Read more: 17 Cloud Cost Optimization Best Practices

4. Self-documenting code

Software development has a philosophy that good code is easy to read. It often doesn’t need extensive comments because it’s clear what it’s doing. 

The idea is that a new developer should be able to come in, read the code, and understand the logic that is happening. IaCis self-documenting, like any other code. This can benefit the product by making it easier to add more people to the team. With self-documenting code, you can reduce the time it takes for a new developer to onboard.

5. Automation

By automating, you reduce the chances of human errors and speed up your deployments considerably. Combining automation with a governance mechanism reduces your failure rates and optimizes uptime.

Another great benefit of automation is that repetitive tasks can be completed without human intervention, leaving time for your engineers to focus on what matters: innovation.

6. Scalability

IaC lets you provision or de-provision resources at a glance just by making small changes to your code. This allows for seamless growth and easy replication of configurations across availability zones, regions, or different cloud accounts. 

By taking advantage of scalability based on load, you ensure that you can handle huge spikes of traffic when required and also reduce the costs associated with your infrastructure in idle times.

7. Consistent configurations

IaC provides standardization, making your configurations consistent and thus reducing unexpected failures due to inconsistencies. By enforcing standardization, you ensure that best practices are applied, and compliance and governance are implemented successfully. 

If you also use a drift detection and remediation mechanism, you can ensure that your infrastructure is working properly and offering your organization consistent results.

Spacelift is an infrastructure orchestration platform that increases your infrastructure deployment speed without sacrificing control.

With Spacelift, you can provision, configure, and govern with one or more automated workflows that orchestrate Terraform, OpenTofu, Terragrunt, Pulumi, CloudFormation, Ansible, and Kubernetes. 

You don’t need to define all the prerequisite steps for installing and configuring the infrastructure tool you are using, nor the deployment and security steps, as they are all available in the default workflow.

Spacelift offers a unique set of infrastructure orchestration capabilities, such as:

• Policies (based on Open Policy Agent) — You can control how many approvals you need for runs, the kind of resources you can create, and the kind of parameters these resources can have, and you can also control the behavior when a pull request is open or merged.
• Multi-IaC workflows — Combine Terraform with Kubernetes, Ansible, and other IaC tools such as OpenTofu, Pulumi, and CloudFormation, create dependencies among them, and share outputs
• Build self-service infrastructure — You can use Blueprints to build self-service infrastructure; simply complete a form to provision infrastructure based on Terraform and other supported tools.
• Integrations with any third-party tools — You can integrate with your favorite third-party tools and even build policies for them. For example, you can Integrate security tools in your workflows using Custom Inputs.
• Drift detection and remediation

Spacelift enables you to create private workers inside your infrastructure, which helps you execute Spacelift-related workflows on your end. The documentation provides more information on configuring private workers.

If you want to learn more about what you can do with Spacelift, check out this article, create a free account today, or book a demo with one of our engineers.

Infrastructure as code is a game-changer for companies, large and small. Although its advantages are often expressed as engineering benefits, they are felt across the entire business, from product to finance. 

It’s not a silver bullet. It requires investment, but when that investment is made, the benefits are almost immediate. Faster product iterations, decreased risk, optimized costs, and simpler onboarding are all benefits that can be felt not only in the engineering team but also within the product team. An investment into a healthier infrastructure process using infrastructure as code can pay dividends for the entire life of the product or company.