Infrastructure as code (IaC). There’s an O’Reilly book about it, and it’s considered “a key attribute of enabling best practices of DevOps” by Wikipedia, so it must be awesome, mustn’t it? Ho wever, our experience at PagerDuty of moving towards infrastructure as code has not been smooth. In fact, there has been plenty of grumbling and pushing away from the everything-as-code appro ach. So is IaC the best thing since sliced bread or an abstract idea that does not survive the challenges of making day-to-day operations faster?

This talk examines some of the principles and arguments for IaC, and shows where these principles and benefits can fall short based on the evolution of IaC at PagerDuty. It explores several a lternatives and seeds some ideas about the possible future directions of Infrastructure as Code. Audience members will leave with a more nuanced, less buzzwordy understanding of the rationale for IaC and the ways in which the principles of IaC could be applied to ship things faster while still allowing fine-grained control.