Third edition is in progress! Early release available now

The third edition of the O'Reilly book Infrastructure as Code is underway, with early-release chapters available on the O'Reilly Learning Platform.

Book cover

When I wrote the first edition of the book in 2016, I mostly focused on server configuration using tools like Chef and Puppet. The second edition in 2020 shifted to infrastructure "stacks" using tools like CDK and Terraform, with more interest in cloud-native application runtimes like container clusters and serverless.

With the third edition, the shift to using infrastructure code to provide application runtimes based on containers and serverless over configuring server images is much farther along. More people are interested in coding infrastructure using procedural languages, as enabled by CDK and Pulumi, and there is curiosity about shifting to integrating application and infrastructure code.

But although these topics are included, the emphasis of the third edition is less on different types of tools, and more on how they are used. Infrastructure architecture needs to be more focused on how it enables value for the organization. We need to start moving beyond hand-crafted infrastructure code, which has left many of us with a sprawl of snowflake environments as code.

So the third edition shares emerging patterns and practices for a more componentized, composable approach to infrastructure as code. I don't believe the journey of infrastructure management ends here. But thoughtful use of effective software design principles and techniques can help us do better, and I hope this new edition will help.

Second edition

The second edition of Infrastructure as Code is available from ([Amazon.com] [Amazon.co.uk] [Amazon.in] [O'Reilly])