Five mistakes teams make with infrastructure as code

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit infrastructure as code.

Operability is a feature, and it has to be built rather than bought. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

The mistakes we see most

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• Clicking around a console is not a reproducible environment
• Review infrastructure changes the same way you review code
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Rebuilding from scratch should be a routine operation. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

Where to go from here

In practice

Cloud work rewards teams who automate early and punishes teams who click through consoles. 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

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.