Week 2 DevOps: Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Terraform & Ansible

This week, we’re shifting gears from CI/CD pipelines to another crucial part of DevOps: Infrastructure as Code (IaC). Managing infrastructure manually is time-consuming, error-prone, and inconsistent. IaC solves this by allowing developers to define and provision infrastructure using code—making deployments repeatable, version-controlled, and reliable.

What is Infrastructure as Code (IaC)?

Infrastructure as Code is the practice of managing and provisioning infrastructure through machine-readable configuration files, rather than through physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools.

With IaC, your infrastructure setup becomes part of your codebase, enabling:

• Consistency – Environments are created identically across dev, staging, and production.
• Repeatability – You can deploy the same setup multiple times without surprises.
• Version Control – Infrastructure configurations can be tracked and rolled back just like application code.

Popular IaC Tools: Terraform & Ansible

Terraform (by HashiCorp)

• Uses a declarative language (HCL) to define infrastructure
• Cloud-agnostic—works with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and more
• Manages resources across providers with a single configuration file

Ansible (by Red Hat)

• Uses YAML for simple, human-readable automation playbooks
• Great for configuration management and software provisioning
• Agentless and easy to integrate into existing pipelines

Using Terraform and Ansible Together

Terraform and Ansible are often used in tandem:

• Use Terraform to provision infrastructure (e.g., create servers, networks, databases)
• Use Ansible to configure infrastructure (e.g., install packages, configure services)

This combo gives teams a powerful way to automate the full lifecycle of infrastructure setup and maintenance.

Best Practices for IaC

• Store IaC code in version control (e.g., Git)
• Modularize your code for reuse and readability
• Validate and test configurations before deployment
• Use remote backends to manage state files securely (for Terraform)
• Implement role-based access controls and audit logs

Wrapping Up

IaC enables faster, safer, and more scalable infrastructure management. With tools like Terraform and Ansible, teams can automate everything from spinning up environments to configuring complex systems—all with code.

Next week, we’ll continue our DevOps journey with a look into Monitoring & Logging with Prometheus and ELK Stack!

Do you use Terraform, Ansible, or both? Let us know how you’re implementing IaC in your projects!