The real cost of ignoring infrastructure as code
The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. Nobody bills you for neglecting infrastructure as code. The cost shows up somewhere else.
Operability is a feature, and it has to be built rather than bought. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.
Where the cost lands
- Time spent on work that should not have been necessary
- Enquiries that quietly never arrive
- Clicking around a console is not a reproducible environment
- Rework, once the problem is finally visible
Review infrastructure changes the same way you review code. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.
Turning this into a decision
Rebuilding from scratch should be a routine operation. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.
How to tell if yours is fine
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
- Clicking around a console is not a reproducible environment — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.