Adoption, Support, and Challenges of Infrastructure-as-Code: Insights from Industry Michele Guerriero,1 Martin Garriga,2 Damian A. Tamburri,3 Fabio Palomba4 1Politecnico di Milano, Italy 2Jheronimus Academy of Data Science & Tilburg University, The Netherlands 3Jheronimus Academy of Data Science & Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands 4University of Zurich, Switzerland
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[email protected], palomba@ifi.uzh.ch Abstract—Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) is the DevOps tactic semi-structured interviews in as many companies to distill: (1) of managing and provisioning infrastructure through machine- how practitioners currently develop infrastructural code — that readable definition files, rather than physical hardware config- is, the best/bad practices experienced by the practitioners as uration or interactive configuration tools. From a maintenance and evolution perspective, the topic has piqued the interest of IaC blueprints grow in size and maintenance costs [8], (2) practitioners and academics alike, given the relative scarcity of what is the automatic support available — that is, pros and supporting patterns, best practices, tools, and software engineer- cons of using existing tools in practice, and (3) the challenges ing techniques. Using the data coming from 44 semi-structured reported by the practitioners via direct experience — that is, interviews in as many companies, in this paper we shed light the research and industrial avenues that practitioners perceive on the state of the practice in the adoption of IaC and the key software engineering challenges in the field. Particularly, as worthy of investigation in the near future. we investigate (i) how practitioners adopt and develop IaC, (ii) Data on the above points reveals a number of results as well which support is currently available, i.e., the typically used as valuable avenues for further work.