Infrastructure as code: what to get right first

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. If you only fix one thing about infrastructure as code this quarter, make it the first item below.

Cloud work rewards teams who automate early and punishes teams who click through consoles. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

Start here

Clicking around a console is not a reproducible environment. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Then this

Review infrastructure changes the same way you review code. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

Eventually

Rebuilding from scratch should be a routine operation. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

The short version

The bill is a design document: it tells you exactly what your architecture actually does. Three things worth confirming about infrastructure as code before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Rebuilding from scratch should be a routine operation — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.