infrastructure-as-code
Infrastructure as Code
The value of IaC isn't that it's faster than clicking through a console — it's that the configuration file is the single source of truth, and anyone can read it to know what the system actually is without logging into anything. The moment someone makes a change out of band, that promise breaks, and every plan after it lies a little.
Terraform is the default lens here because it's the common ground across clouds, but the discipline applies equally to CloudFormation, Pulumi, or Bicep.
If the state of the system can't be reconstructed by reading the repo, it isn't infrastructure as code — it's infrastructure with extra steps.
For Terraform specifics — plan symbols, state operations, backends, forced replacement, and drift
detection — read references/terraform.md.