Summary

In this chapter, we discussed and covered some of the core concepts we will be following throughout the remainder of the book. We talked about my own journey with Infrastructure as Code, which we will be picking up in further chapters.

We discussed some of the common questions that get raised when discussing Infrastructure-as-Code projects, along with some of the positive and negative feedback you may get. Then we went on to talk about the differences between the two deployment approaches.

The first is declarative and imperative, which is how your deployment code is executed and in which order.

The second approach we discussed, pets versus cattle, while not strictly an Infrastructure-as-Code method, does have relevance to the approach you would take to writing your Infrastructure-as-Code scripts.

As we get more hands-on, I will share some of my own challenges and successes with Infrastructure as Code.

Speaking of getting more hands-on, in our next chapter, Chapter 2, Ansible and Terraform beyond the Documentation, we are going to look at two of the most common Infrastructure-as-Code tools and start looking at some actual Infrastructure-as-Code examples, as well as get an idea of how concepts such as declarative and imperative apply to them. Plus, we will be covering some tips and tricks based on my own experience with the two tools.