Use Infrastructure as Code to Unlock Your Organization’s Cloud Potential

Technical professionals working with public cloud environments often struggle to align desired business outcomes and corporate cloud strategy, in part because they are stuck in the “infrastructure-up” mindset. Infrastructure as code enables an “application-down” approach. With IaC, cloud architects and application teams can conceptualize applications as bundled with their infrastructure and other resources, rather than apps placed on top of a separate infrastructure layer.

Using IaC, you can bring traditional software engineering principles to your cloud operations. Organizations find the adoption of IaC to be an accelerator for cloud migrations and adoptions because of its ease of use for expressing reference architectures.

Cloud infrastructure as code improves the agility, productivity and efficiency of application teams and technical end users. IaC also provides the foundation for cloud governance, security, regulatory compliance and more agile operations. 

This adaptive form of governance enables a differentiated approach to risk management in development, testing and production environments. However, the path to IaC adoption isn’t always straightforward, and organizations may struggle to get started.

Roadblocks to IaC adoption include:

• Determining when and how to use cloud IaC

• Allocating responsibilities for creating and updating cloud IaC and managing the IaC library

• Governing the intersection of cloud policies, self-service and the use of IaC

In the Gartner recommended cloud operating model, an organization’s cloud enterprise architecture function, such as the cloud center of excellence (CCOE), is responsible for the enterprise’s governance and brokerage of public cloud computing. As such, cloud architects in the CCOE may be asked to lead the adoption of IaC in the public cloud, even if their organization has already adopted some IaC on-premises.

CCOE cloud architects should:

• Create enterprisewide standards and best practices for using the public cloud.

• Deliver reference architectures for cloud solutions and express those architectures as IaC.

• Maintain service catalog items for cloud solutions using IaC.

• Express cloud governance guidelines and guardrails using IaC and policy as code.

• Serve as the product manager for a cloud platform operations function or platform engineering team, setting the vision for using IaC, automation and continuous configuration management in the context of public cloud implementation.