Intro

As a platform architect, I often discuss Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with my clients. This simple shift in IT infrastructure management, which has been widely adopted by the modern tech industry, has many implicit benefits. In this article, I will explain what adopting IaC means for businesses and how it can help reduce costs and increase profits for the whole organisation, whether technical or non-technical.

What IaC is?

The basis of the IaC principle lies in its name - describing infrastructure as code - and having it provisioned accordingly. That’s it. Why? Because since you have infrastructure in code format, you can leverage the wide range of tools available to support the software lifecycle.

IaC = declarative desired state + automated reconciliation + controlled change process + observable outcomes

IaC often uses declarative desired-state definitions, which means you must describe what infrastructure you want, not how you want it to be rolled out. This hides a lot of complexity of infrastructure management, so your engineers may focus on your business goals, not fighting the cloud provider.

terraform { required_providers { aws = { source="hashicorp/aws", version="~> 5.0" } } }
provider "aws" { region = "eu-central-1" }

module "vpc" {
  source  = "terraform-aws-modules/vpc/aws"; version = "~> 5.0"
  name="dev" cidr="10.0.0.0/16" azs=["eu-central-1a","eu-central-1b"]
  public_subnets=["10.0.1.0/24","10.0.2.0/24"] private_subnets=["10.0.11.0/24","10.0.12.0/24"]
  enable_nat_gateway=true
}

module "db" {
  source="terraform-aws-modules/rds/aws"; version="~> 6.0"
  identifier="dev-db" engine="postgres" engine_version="16"
  instance_class="db.t3.micro" allocated_storage=20
  db_name="app" username="app" password="change-me"
  vpc_security_group_ids=[] subnet_ids=module.vpc.private_subnets
}

module "app" {
  source="terraform-aws-modules/ecs/aws"; version="~> 5.0"
  cluster_name="dev" services={ api={ cpu=256 memory=512 desired_count=1
    container_definitions={ api={ image="nginx:alpine" port_mappings=[{containerPort=80}] } } } }
  subnet_ids=module.vpc.private_subnets
}

Example: backend application infrastructure defined as code in Terraform.

IaC helps you not only save money but also grow faster and earn more. Let me show you the most impactful ways:

• change control and reliability
• preventing production crashes
• enforcing security
• shortening time-to-market
• enabling team independence

Change control and reliability

Since your infrastructure is defined as code, your engineers can now use a lot of tools and techniques to automate their actions:

Use version control software (such as git) to manage changes, see history, and roll back easily if needed. This enables all kinds of automation we have in modern systems, such as automated rollbacks based on monitoring - such as seamlessly reverting a bug in production without any human intervention.

Implement automated checks and validations using Continuous Integration (CI) - making all code verified before being executed, and providing a visible audit trail.

Enforce a responsibility chain via code reviews - now you can let junior engineers prepare infrastructure changes and test them in dev/test stages, but request approval by a senior engineer before deploying into production, thus delegating and parallelising routine work while keeping a responsible person in charge.

Speed up audits. Since all infrastructure is managed the same way, and the historical changes are preserved, you don’t need to search for this information or analyse logs when there is a time for an audit.

This all helps to make your changes more stable and predictable, decreasing the amount of failures and drastically improving speed. More important, it limits the impact of human error and simplifies recovery.

DORA’s 2021 research summary reports “elite” software delivery teams deploy 973x more frequently, have a 6,570x faster lead time to deploy, and a 3x lower change failure rate than “low” performers - gaps that are strongly associated with CI/CD and automation capabilities. Source

Preventing Production Crashes

Using the same infrastructure templates for different environments makes things more predictable - and pushes errors back to the development phase, where they are easier to find and cheaper to fix.

Easy configuration change using code tools makes it simple and fast to upgrade your infrastructure, adjusting resources to your current needs.

Reuse the same configuration in different environments - the same infrastructure in dev, test, prod, multiple regions - all the same except for configuration and scale.

Predictable test environments will minimise manual testing time. Since it is almost the same across all of the stages, there are less things to break and therefore less things to test - so you may not need manual testing one day at all.

These features make testing and deployments predictable, release cycles faster, and expanding to new markets fast. Moreover, since all environments are similar, you fix most errors before they reach production.

A NIST study shows defect repair cost can rise from 1x (requirements/design) to 30x (post-release), illustrating the economic value of catching environment/configuration issues earlier in the lifecycle. Source

Enforcing Security

Eliminate manual changes - now all configuration is done via code, so you can be sure the change request follows the same procedure and restrict direct changes via APIs or cloud consoles, so that the code is the main source of truth.

Grant limited role-based access so that only several people have direct access to production, which reduces the risk of a single person breaking the infrastructure or getting access to sensitive data.

Automate vulnerability checks - there are plenty of tools for preventing your team from making potentially dangerous changes to your infrastructure.

These features are easy to implement on top of IaC. It makes your infrastructure much more secure against cybersecurity threats, preventing big potential losses.

IBM/Ponemon’s 2024 Cost of a Data Breach report finds organizations using security AI & automation extensively averaged $3.84M per breach vs $5.72M without ($1.88M lower) and identified/contained breaches ~100 days faster on average. Source

Shortening Time-to-Market

Now let’s switch from saving to gaining. How does IaC help your business actually increase profits?

Simple and predictable infrastructure changes allow your engineers to focus on your business targets, not on infra management. Need a new machine to test a new tech - here it is in minutes, not days.

Scaling is easy - and fast. Need more resources to serve new customers after a successful campaign? One simple change in configuration will do, even without autoscaling and sophisticated microservice architecture, just when you need it (not a month later). Don’t need it anymore? Scale it down and save money.

Entering new markets sooner by cloning your environment into a new region - the same infrastructure, but new passwords and names, provided as configuration. In my own experience, setting up the whole data centre of a cloud provider took days using IaC instead of the usual months.

The faster you can deliver your changes to customers, the faster you can react to market changes and generate value. IaC eliminates unnecessary waiting and ensures stable delivery.

A Forrester TEI study on CA Release Automation reports one telecom delivered a feature set in 10 days vs 4–5 months previously, and another organization increased deployments from 2–3/week to 10/week with fewer resources. Source

Enabling Team Independence

Ephemeral environments for extra momentum - why make your engineers wait? Every hour lost in waiting is money and potential wasted. Use short-lived on-demand environments for development and testing. Each feature branch creates a tiny tailored environment for testing and troubleshooting, destroyed when the feature is merged.

Make teams own their environments. Since infrastructure configuration is now easy and secure, you can delegate it directly to product teams, eliminating the usual DevOps bottleneck of waiting until your request is executed by the infra team. Let DevOps engineers focus on infrastructure development, and product engineers fulfil their own needs without waiting. By having the responsibility chain now automated, you can limit cloud spend and prevent resource overconsumption.

Enable a developer platform. The next step may be building or integrating an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) - a concept of self-service tooling, making everything around development simple, so that software engineers can focus on developing new features instead of fighting for a new server.

This all makes your teams work faster, and grow your workforce without bottlenecks. So hiring a whole new team for a new product will enable the team to build and deliver the product without depending on someone else.

Forrester’s TEI on VMware Cloud Foundation Automation reports time to deploy new VMs fell 50% and self-service provisioning cut delivery from 3–4 days to ~30 minutes, recapturing ~4,500 labor hours and avoiding 60% of infrastructure-related IT tickets. Source

Why Having Infrastructure Defined as Code?

After all, IaC is not just another way to manage the IT infrastructure. It is the main building block not only for automation and continuous security, but also for enabling engineering teams to deliver faster by removing obstacles, such as dependency on an infrastructure team to get new hardware, or to deploy environment components such as databases, caches, message brokers, etc.

Atlassian’s 2025 State of DevEx survey reports 50% of developers lose 10+ hours/week and 90% lose 6+ hours/week due to organizational inefficiencies. Source

All this time spent on waiting for someone to approve their request or to provision a virtual machine in several clicks is product development time wasted and business opportunities lost. By adopting IaC, we enable a whole range of possibilities for the business to grow faster, run smoother, and be maintained in a secure and predictable way.