Infrastructure as code (IaC) is the practice of defining and managing servers, networks, cloud resources and configuration in machine-readable files instead of manual setup. The files are versioned, reviewed and applied by automation tools, so every environment can be rebuilt the same way, every time.
IaC tools fall into two broad styles. Declarative tools such as Terraform describe the end state, and the tool works out the steps. Configuration management tools such as Ansible describe tasks that bring systems into the desired state. Many teams use both: Terraform to provision cloud resources and Ansible to configure them.
Because IaC is code, it can be reviewed, tested and governed like application code. That’s also its risk. One wrong line can change production at scale, and AI coding assistants now write a growing share of these files. Steampunk Spotter verifies Ansible and Terraform code before execution, so policy, security and compatibility issues are caught at commit and in CI/CD.
Ansible is an infrastructure as code tool: Ansible Playbooks define system configuration and infrastructure tasks in YAML. It’s most often used for configuration management, while Terraform is most often used for provisioning.
