Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a model-based descriptive method for configuring and managing infrastructure. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has reshaped how businesses operate when designing and constructing IT infrastructure. It pushes for the best practices required to make infrastructure construction and configuration more cost-effective and competitive.

Using a descriptive model, it sets up and maintains the infrastructure. The key is to manage your infrastructure's settings and setup the same way you handle your applications' code. In most cases, the configuration modules are kept in version control systems in well-documented code formats, improving precision, lessening room for error, and boosting speed and consistency. It also automates configuring servers, virtual machines, and cloud computing, eliminating the need for human intervention.

Here are the interesting "Infrastructure as Code" tools in 2022.

AWS CloudFormation

Users who regularly conduct business on the AWS Cloud will benefit significantly from the integrated AWS service. Over 350,000 developers use CloudFormation, which makes sense given that AWS is still one of the most widely adopted cloud platforms. This year, users can also take advantage of the 342 AWS resource types available for provisioning. With CloudFormation, users can model their infrastructure in a JSON or YAML template file. You only pay for the resources you use, and the service itself is free. It makes the service particularly attractive for large organizations that need to deploy resources regularly in a predictable and controlled way. Once the template is set up to your app's specs, CloudFormation will take care of the rest. For its convenience, the plaintext is a format that is widely used. CloudFormation supports YAML and JSON, and its various templates make it simple to set up a secure infrastructure architecture of any complexity.

Terraform

Terraform's ability to handle the extensive infrastructure for complicated distributed applications, for example, is far more appealing than working on a cloud-specific platform. A wide range of shapes and degrees of orchestration is possible in a Terraform automation setup, but all of them centre on the central plan/apply cycle. Some groups use wrapper scripts to execute Terraform locally and ensure it always uses the same working directory. On the other hand, some development groups prefer to use another orchestration tool, such as Jenkins, to execute Terraform. It's the most versatile tool here but also the most daunting, at least at first. Terraform includes a lot of the same features as Google CDM, including the ability to preview changes before they are made and the ability to replicate deployments and individual server instances. In addition, Terraform's version control and remote states offer a single, reliable truth for distributed teams.

Ansible

The goal of RedHat's development of the Ansible automation tool was to make complex tasks easier to execute. The solution supports DevOps teams in deploying apps more quickly, reliably, and in a coordinated fashion, all of which contribute to IT modernization. Creating many similar environments with security baselines can be done rapidly without worrying about fulfilling compliance criteria. Provisioning, configuring, and we can automate maintaining applications and IT infrastructure with Ansible in the easiest way possible. We can execute Ansible playbooks to create and control the infrastructure's assets. As a result, it is possible to connect to servers and issue commands over SSH without needing agents. It is because YAML is used for the code, which makes the configurations easy to read and implement. It is possible to extend Ansible's functionality by installing additional modules and plugins.

Azure Resource Manager

Templates in Azure Resource Manager make it possible to deploy infrastructure and manage dependencies in a single, streamlined cycle (ARM templates). We may find declarative descriptions of the resources your template uses in JSON. You can define several Azure resources in a single ARM template to set up whole project setups. Furthermore, you can repeat the same ARM template indefinitely with the same output since ARM templates are idempotent. In addition, the Resource Manager allows for the centralized management of groups and the grouping of server instances.

Chef

Chef is widely used in the CI/CD community as an IAC tool. One of Chef's many benefits is that it uses Ruby as its DSL. Even when the infrastructure needs to scale quickly to accommodate the app's rapid expansion, it offers 'cookbook' versioning from the get-go so you can keep your configuration stable. The cornerstone of Chef's configuration is its recipes and cookbooks, which are self-styled names for templates and collections of templates that We can use immediately. While we should only use a single cookbook for a single purpose, it may produce multiple server configurations depending on the available assets (e.g., a web application with a database will have two recipes, one for each part, stored together).

Puppet

Like Chef, Puppet employs a Ruby-based DSL to describe your infrastructure's intended state. In contrast to Chef, Puppet takes a declarative approach, meaning that you define the desired configurations and Puppet figures out the logistics. In addition, Puppet is an IAC toolkit for delivering large-scale, high-velocity, secure systems. A sizable community of programmers have created add-ons to increase the program's usefulness. Finally, Puppet interacts with most of the market's most popular IaaS providers like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and VMware to facilitate multi-cloud automation.