Infrastructure as Code: Why Most Networks Are Still Built Like It's 2005 – Extended Version

IaC Series | Issue 1 of 6: When Your Network Becomes Software

In the free version of this issue, we talked about how traditional infrastructure tends to evolve into snowflake systems.

Every device becomes slightly different.

Configs drift.
Documentation gets outdated.
And the only reliable record of the infrastructure becomes the running configuration on the device.

Infrastructure as Code attempts to solve that problem.

But understanding IaC requires thinking about infrastructure in a completely different way.

Instead of asking:

“How do we configure this device?”

IaC asks a different question:

“How do we recreate this infrastructure from scratch?”

That shift in thinking is where most teams struggle.

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The Real Test of Infrastructure

A good way to understand Infrastructure as Code is to imagine a simple scenario.

A core switch fails.

Completely dead.

No configuration backup available.