In today’s day and day and if you were to spin up an environment for your client, you do not need to do it the conventional way which is configuring the physical or virtual device itself you leverage a code in the form of the script to build the environment. This is obviously dependent on multiple pre-requisites, however if the results of doing this in the right manner can be truly amazing. But the question is why code was even required to build an infrastructure? Well, the answer is simple, most Tech companies had segmented their Application Solutions and Infrastructure Solutions support teams hence there was no interaction with both the teams even though they both have critical roles to play. Let’s understand with an example:
There’s a web application hosted on the web server; the developers want to add a new functionality to the web application. Since they do not have a dedicated test environment in most cases, they end up asking the operations team to take a replica of the current infrastructure and hand them over for testing. Meanwhile there’s another Developer team that wants to add something else to the web application and their ask to the operation teams is exactly identical. Now there are 2 different Dev or Staging environments to play with by the Developer teams that causes some level of headaches to the operations team as they are the ones who are on point for patching the servers and keeping them up to date. Guess what, both the developer teams tweak the OS for their web application to work with the new functionality or release. Now when they try to deploy the web application to Production all hell breaks loose because of inconsistencies across Development teams and operations. Imagine an ecommerce site like Amazon or Flipkart having to go with this approach. Hence the idea of Devops came into existence and the need for Infrastructure as a code so as to bridge the gap between Infra teams and Development teams.