This book explains how to take advantage of technologies like cloud, virtualization, and configuration automation to manage IT infrastructure using tools and practices from software development. These technologies have decoupled infrastructure from the underlying hardware, turning it into data and code. "Infrastructure as Code" has emerged alongside the DevOps movement as a label for approaches that merge concepts like source control systems, Test Driven Development (TDD) and Continuous Integration (CI) with infrastructure management.

Virtualization and cloud make it easy to rapidly expand the size of infrastructure, but the habits and practices we used in the past with hardware-based infrastructure don't keep up. Teams end up with hundreds of servers, all a bit different, and find themselves unable to fully automate their infrastructure.

The book will go through the challenges and problems created by all these wonderful new tools, and the principles and mindset changes that a team needs to make to use them effectively. It describes patterns, practices, and ideas that have been adopted from software development, especially Agile concepts, and brought into the IT Ops world as part of the DevOps movement. These ways of working have been proven in many organizations, including well known names like Netflix, Amazon, and Etsy, and also in more established organizations including publishers, banks, and even the British government.

Kief Morris has been designing, building, and running automated IT server infrastructure for nearly twenty years, having started out with shell scripts and Perl, moving on to CFengine, Puppet, Chef, and Ansible among other technologies as they’ve emerged. He is the head of ThoughtWorks’ European practice for Continuous Delivery and DevOps, helping clients find more effective ways of building and managing infrastructure operations.