Infrastructure as Code: Stop Treating Servers Like Pets

By STS Consulting Group | Reading time: 6 minutes

There's an old DevOps saying: 'Treat your servers like cattle, not pets.' Pets have names. You care for them individually. When they get sick, you nurse them back to health. Cattle are numbered. They're interchangeable. When one has problems, you replace it.

If your infrastructure feels more like a collection of carefully nurtured pets—each server unique, its configuration known only to the person who set it up, terrifying to touch for fear of breaking something—you have a problem that Infrastructure as Code can solve.

What Is Infrastructure as Code?

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) means managing your servers, networks, and cloud resources through machine-readable definition files rather than manual configuration. Instead of clicking through a cloud console or SSHing into servers to make changes, you write code that describes what your infrastructure should look like.

Tools like Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, Pulumi, and Ansible let you define infrastructure in configuration files. When you run these tools, they create, modify, or destroy resources to match your definitions.

The code lives in version control, just like application code. You can see the history of every change, who made it, and why.

The Problems IaC Solves

Configuration Drift: Over time, manually managed servers diverge from each other. Patches applied here but not there. Settings tweaked to fix one problem. Before long, no two servers are identical, and deploying consistently becomes impossible.

Knowledge Silos: When infrastructure exists only as manual configurations, knowledge lives in people's heads. When those people leave or forget, you're left reverse-engineering what exists and why.

Slow Provisioning: Need a new environment? Manually setting up servers, networks, and services takes days or weeks. With IaC, you can spin up identical environments in minutes.

Disaster Recovery Gaps: Can you rebuild your infrastructure from scratch? If your documentation consists of years of accumulated wiki pages and tribal knowledge, the answer is probably 'not quickly.' IaC definitions serve as executable documentation.

Audit Challenges: Auditors ask 'Who changed what, when, and why?' Manual changes leave no trail. IaC changes are commits in version control with full history.

Real-World Benefits

When we implement IaC with clients, we typically see dramatic improvements across several areas.

Environment provisioning drops from days to hours or minutes. Teams can spin up development, testing, and staging environments on demand, accelerating the entire development lifecycle.

Consistency issues virtually disappear. When every environment is built from the same code, 'it works in dev but not production' becomes a thing of the past.

Recovery times improve dramatically. We've helped clients reduce disaster recovery times from days to hours because rebuilding infrastructure is automated, not manual.

Teams gain confidence to make changes. When infrastructure is defined in code and changes can be tested before deployment, people stop being afraid to improve things.

Getting Started: A Practical Path

Adopting IaC doesn't require a big-bang transformation. We recommend starting small:

1. Pick a non-critical system: Start with a development environment or a new project. Don't begin by codifying your production database server.

2. Choose your tools: Terraform has become the industry standard for multi-cloud infrastructure. If you're single-cloud, native tools like CloudFormation or Azure Resource Manager work well. Configuration management tools like Ansible handle server-level configuration.

3. Document as you go: Your IaC definitions should include comments explaining not just what, but why. Future you will be grateful.

4. Build testing into the process: Just like application code, infrastructure code should be tested. Tools like Terratest help validate that your infrastructure works as expected.

5. Expand gradually: As your team builds competence, bring more infrastructure under code management. Eventually, everything that can be codified should be.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Don't bypass the code: Manual changes outside IaC create drift and confusion. Establish a strict policy: all changes through code.

Don't hardcode secrets: Passwords, API keys, and certificates don't belong in your IaC files. Use secret management tools.

Don't skip state management: Tools like Terraform maintain state files that track what's been created. Proper state management is essential for team collaboration.

How We Help

Infrastructure as Code is a cornerstone of our Platform Engineering & DevOps Enablement practice. We help organizations assess their current infrastructure management maturity, design IaC strategies that fit their cloud environment and team capabilities, implement tooling and processes, and train teams to maintain and extend the work.

Ready to stop treating your servers like pets? Schedule a free consultation to discuss how IaC can transform your infrastructure management.