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 are Infrastructure as Code (IaC) services that let you define cloud resources in files (templates/config) and deploy them consistently. CloudFormation/ARM/Deployment Manager are provider-native; OCI Resource Manager runs Terraform for OCI.