Empowering DevOps with Infrastructure as Code :Trends, Tools and Techniques

DevOps has arisen as a pillar of modern software engineering, emphasising the integration of development and operations to ensure effective product delivery. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is an important DevOps technique that involves defining and managing infrastructure requirements using code, enabling for automated provisioning and maintenance. This technique enhances traceability, reuse, and consistency across development and production environments. The introduction of microservices architectures has increased project teams’ infras- tructure responsibilities, making IaC essential for delivering reliable and efficient deployments. IaC enables developers to describe infrastructure in code, simplifying the deployment process. In both large and small businesses, IaC is essen- tial for supporting efficient DevOps processes.The most recent breakthroughs, tools, and techniques in IaC demonstrate a revolutionary impact on software development and deployment workflows. As more businesses adopt cloud-native designs and containerisation technologies, the requirement for automated infrastructure provisioning grows, leading in the growth of IaC tools and methodologies. Organisations that combine IaC with continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipelines can re- duce time-to-market and improve operational efficiency. IaC not only automates infrastructure management, but it also includes software engineering principles like version control and testing into infrastructure provisioning, which improves consistency and reliability. This democratisation of infrastructure management encourages increased collaboration across cross-functional teams, hence improving accountability and innovation. Implementing IaC is therefore crucial for achieving agility, scalability, and resilience in the digital age. Index Terms—Iac, DevOps, CI/CD, Automation, Cloud-native, Infrastructure Provisioning ,Terraform, Ansible, AWS CloudFor- mation