Getting started with infrastructure as code
This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. A short on-ramp to infrastructure as code for teams who have not touched it before.
The bill is a design document: it tells you exactly what your architecture actually does. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.
Why this earns attention
Clicking around a console is not a reproducible environment. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.
Your first week
- Find out what is already in place
- Review infrastructure changes the same way you review code
- Change one thing and measure it
Rebuilding from scratch should be a routine operation. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.
In practice
Operability is a feature, and it has to be built rather than bought. Three things worth confirming about infrastructure as code before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Review infrastructure changes the same way you review code — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.