Adoption, support, and challenges of infrastructure-as-code: insights from industry

Abstract

Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) is the DevOps tactic of managing and provisioning infrastructure through machine-readable definition files, rather than physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools. From a maintenance and evolution perspective, the topic has picked the interest of practitioners and academics alike, given the relative scarcity of supporting patterns, best practices, tools, and software engineering techniques. Using the data coming from 44 semistructured interviews to senior developers of as many companies, in this paper we shed light on the state of the practice in the adoption of IaC and the key software engineering challenges in the field. Particularly, we investigate (i) how practitioners adopt and develop IaC, (ii) which support is currently available, i.e., the typically used tools and their advantages/disadvantages, and (iii) what are the practitioner's needs when dealing with IaC development, maintenance, and evolution. Our findings clearly highlight the need for more research in the field: the support provided by currently available tools is still limited, and developers feel the need of novel techniques for testing and maintaining IaC code.