Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) is the DevOps tactic of managing and provisioning infrastructure through machine-readable definition files, rather than physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools.
From a maintenance and evolution perspective, the topic has piqued the interest of practitioners and academics alike, given the relative scarcity of supporting patterns, best practices, tools, and software engineering techniques.
By using the data comin
g from 44 semi-structured interviews in as many companies, our team shed light on the state of the practice in the adoption of IaC and the key software engineering challenges in the field. Particularly, in RADON we investigate:
- how practitioners adopt and develop IaC
- which support is currently available, i.e., the typically used tools and their advantages/disadvantages
- what are the practitioner’s needs when dealing with IaC development, maintenance, and evolution
All findings analysed in the paper ‘Adoption, Support, and Challenges of Infrastructure-as-Code: Insights from Industry’ clearly highlight the need for more research in the field: the support provided by currently available tools is still limited, and developers feel the need of novel techniques for testing and maintaining IaC code.
You can read the ‘Adoption, Support, and Challenges of Infrastructure-as-Code: Insights from Industry’ paper here.