Question 1

What's the difference between Infrastructure as Code and configuration management?

Accepted Answer

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) focuses on creating and changing infrastructure resources like networks, load balancers, databases, and Kubernetes clusters. Configuration management focuses on what runs inside those resources, like installing packages, setting OS settings, and managing application configuration. In practice, teams often use both: IaC to provision the servers/services, and configuration management to configure them.

Question 2

When should I use Infrastructure as Code?

Accepted Answer

Use IaC when you need repeatable, consistent environments (dev/test/prod), frequent infrastructure changes, multiple regions/accounts/subscriptions, disaster recovery that depends on rebuilding quickly, or compliance/auditing where you want an approval trail for changes. It’s especially useful once manual setup becomes slow, error-prone, or hard to reproduce.

Question 3

How much does Infrastructure as Code cost?

Accepted Answer

IaC tools are often free or included (for example, AWS CloudFormation and Azure ARM are included; Terraform has an open-source edition). The main costs are (1) the cloud resources you create, (2) state storage and CI/CD runners (usually small), and (3) engineering time to write, review, test, and maintain code. Some managed offerings (for example, Terraform Cloud/Enterprise or OCI Resource Manager usage patterns) may add subscription or service charges depending on features and scale.

Infrastructure as Code

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