Kief Morris

Infrastructure as Code is a radically different way of working for many infrastructure teams, and for application teams. Users are used to raising tickets, sending emails, or coming around to the desks of infrastructure people to ask for things to be done. Infrastructure people are used to carrying out work by following checklists and running scripts. Managers are used to having detailed designs and project plans for major work, and change request forms and change review boards to handle smaller tasks. Infrastructure as Code is very different. Infrastructure is defined in files in source control. Change management pipelines - like application deployment pipelines - propagate changes, automatically integrating and testing changes before they are pushed into production. The end result of this is that it's possible to have much more rigorous control and assurance of infrastructure implementation and changes, with much less planning and ceremony. This talk aims to describe the moving parts of a typical organisation using Infrastructure as Code. Moving beyond the general patterns, to looking at exactly how changes are implemented and rolled out.

Most organizations today have adopted IT infrastructure automation tools and dynamic infrastructure platforms such as private or public clouds. However, the technology alone isn't enough to help IT respond quickly and reliably to changing opportunities and challenges. At worst they can lead to a "Sorcerer's Apprentice" situation, where the ability to rapidly spin up new infrastructure leads to a sprawl of poorly maintained systems. Infrastructure as Code is an approach to managing infrastructure that leverages software engineering practices. Companies like Netflix, Facebook, and Etsy have pioneered a new generation of principles and practices for IT change management. IT teams who have adopted these ideas find that they can not only make changes far more frequently than they could with old ways of working, but they can actually increase the reliability, security and quality of their IT services.