Infrastructure as Code & GitOps

Infrastructure stops being clicks in a console and becomes a file you can read, review and hand to someone else.

Before you start. You need to know what a shared, versioned file is - a document with a history everyone can see, which is what people mean by keeping something “in git.” You also need to know that “the cloud” just means a computer sitting somewhere else, which changes exactly as much as anyone who can log in decides to change it, by hand or by a tool.

The idea in 30 seconds

Click-ops changes the real building with nothing written down, and nobody can reproduce or explain it later.
Infrastructure as Code describes the building in a file; a tool makes reality match the file, and doing so twice is safe.
Terraform’s state is a third thing - not the file, not the building, but its own notebook of what it last built - and it checks reality fresh before comparing anything.
Drift is reality quietly diverging from the file; the next check finds it and overwrites it back.
GitOps removes the “run the tool by hand” step: git is the filed blueprint, and a patrol reconciles the real system to it continuously.
Some things can never just live in the file - a password, a tag that changes on every deploy, a value another controller also writes - and each needs its own answer.

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