The practice of using code and tools to automatically provision, configure, and manage cloud infrastructure instead of manual processes. Like having robots build and maintain your data center, infrastructure automation ensures consistent, repeatable, and error-free deployments. Tools include Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, Azure Resource Manager, Google Cloud Deployment Manager, and OCI Resource Manager.
Instead of manually clicking through the AWS console to create servers, a DevOps team writes Terraform code that automatically provisions 50 identical web servers across multiple regions with proper security groups and load balancers.
All four are native Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) services that let you define cloud resources in templates and deploy them consistently. Terraform is a popular cross-cloud alternative that can manage resources across these providers.