Infrastructure as Code

In a cloud environment which is predominantly API-driven there's a much higher elasticity of infrastructure, where instead of months to years, it takes days to weeks in terms of duration that a resource might live. We might scale up to handle a load during a peak day, and then scale down at night to save on cost, because it's not a fixed cost. Unlike owning hardware that we can depreciate, we're now paying by the hour. So, it makes sense to only use the infrastructure you need, and you have to have this elasticity. "Infrastructure as code" is the answer to managing large-scale, distributed systems, cloud-native applications, and service-based architectures.