Maryam Mayabi Joghal - Ferdowsi University of Mashhad
Zeinab Khadem - Ferdowsi University of Mashhad

Managing IT infrastructure presents significant challenges, includinghigh costs and risks of changes, slow issue resolution, misconfigurations,complex disaster recovery, and reliance on infrastructure administrators.This article explores an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach toovercome these issues, drawing on software development practices likeversion control and automated testing.The proposed IaC implementation ensures rapid, secure provisioning ofcloud resources aligned with organizational needs, following keyprinciples of reproducibility, idempotency, composability, andevolvability (RICE). It includes three layers: Decision, Deployment, andDocumentation. The Decision Layer evaluates user requests againsttechnical and managerial policies, rules, and constraints to optimizeinfrastructure selection. The Deployment Layer implementsconfigurations based on predefined templates, ensuring consistency andreliability. The Documentation Layer aids process improvement,informed decision-making, disaster recovery, and security analysis.The implementation utilizes YAML, Python, and Ansible. The resultsdemonstrate an ۸۳% reduction in provisioning time, significantlyenhancing efficiency and accuracy while reducing failures. Thisautomation shifts the focus of infrastructure specialists from maintenanceto code improvement, optimizing resource management. In conclusion,the presented IaC implementation closely adheres to the RICE principles,providing a highly reproducible, idempotent, and evolvable process forthe rapid and secure delivery of compute resources tailored to theorganization's specific requirements.

Infrastructure as Code, Cloud, Automation, InfrastructureProvisioning, Virtualization