Author
Indika Kumara, Martín Garriga, Angel Urbano Romeu, DarioDi Nucci, Fabio Palomba, Damian Andrew Tamburri, Willem-Janvan den Heuvel

ScienceDirect - Information and Software Technology Volume 137, September 2021, 106593

Abstract: Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) is the DevOps tactic of managing and provisioning software infrastructures through machine-readable definition files, rather than manual 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 and practices in the academic literature. At the same time, a considerable amount of gray literature exists on IaC. Thus we aim to characterize IaC and compile a catalog of best and bad practices for widely used IaC languages, all using gray literature materials.

Keywords: Infrastructure as Code, DevOps, Gray literature review