Infrastructure-as-code promises a new way of bringing consistency and repeatability to cloud environments. Yet, it’s easy to get caught up in designing and implementing these infrastructures purely as if they are software artifacts divorced from operational realities. This separation can leave developers unprepared for the complexities of managing and operating their work once it’s running in production. In truth, building cloud infrastructure and managing cloud infrastructure are inseparable tasks — both need to be considered from the very beginning — otherwise, bad things will happen. There be dragons.

Day 1 and Day 2 Ops Are Inherently Entangled

From the initial conception of your infrastructure, starting on Day 1, you should be thinking about things that will need to happen during its ongoing lifecycle, Day 2 and beyond.

If you build without thinking about how you will manage, you’re essentially paving the way for fragile deployments that become unmanageable once real-world use cases come into play.

Infrastructure-as-code isn’t just about spinning up resources through templates or scripts. It’s about establishing a “paved road” that developers and platform engineers can use to shepherd future changes and tweaks to their environment over time, ensuring environments align with security, networking, and governance standards right from the start but can adapt — as needed, going forward.

Authoring IaC with Operability in Mind

Developers often approach IaC with the same mindset they use when writing application code. They concentrate on performance, scalability, and reusability, which are certainly valuable considerations — for applications and services processing HTTP Requests. But when it comes to infrastructure, these priorities need to have a different focus: operability.

A highly optimized environment that’s difficult to manage in production becomes a liability. Every code change should be tested and validated to guarantee predictable outcomes, especially as these updates move through different stages of your deployment pipeline. By thinking about how an environment will be monitored, patched, or scaled in daily operations, developers can avoid significant pitfalls that might only become obvious during a critical time — when there’s an outage or a system degradation that demands a response and the stakes are much higher.

Building and operating should not be considered two distinct phases but rather a continuous cycle that follows an iterative process where continuous improvement is the goal — not perfection.

When “build” is kept in lockstep with “operate,” your infrastructure is better suited to handle everything from capacity planning to new feature rollouts. You need to consider how easy it is for operators to make a change. Can that change be isolated from impacting other parts of the system?

Conclusion

Successful Infrastructure-as-Code doesn’t start and end at deployment. It carries forward into the daily management of your cloud environment — and the applications that run therein. This is why Day 1 and Day 2 operational concerns are impossible to separate — without risking dire consequences and folly.

By recognizing the co-dependence of these disciplines and ensuring your developers consider operational realities from the outset, you lay the groundwork for environments that are not only high-performing but also reliable in the face of changing business demands. This is how you truly capitalize on the promise of Infrastructure-as-Code: by building with a clear eye on the maintenance operations that will inevitably follow.