Founder and CEO of Artisan, an innovation consultancy supporting global leaders with technology strategy and solution services.

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FC Barcelona is more than an incredibly successful soccer team. It’s a big business, too, with $1 billion in revenue and more than 340 million followers on social media.

This poses quite a challenge for the IT department working behind the scenes to keep the team’s digital platforms running smoothly.

FC Barcelona’s web platform alone has more than 6,000 pages and 12,000 digitized photographs spread across six different languages. And then, of course, there are huge spikes in traffic when the team trades a star player or wins a trophy.

Managing all of this is both complicated and costly. But thanks to something called infrastructure as code (IaC) and the scalability of Amazon Web Services (AWS), it’s becoming a lot easier.

Infrastructure As Code

Infrastructure means many things today. Along with conventional hardware like servers and data centers, the shift to the cloud has added increasingly sophisticated digitized infrastructure such as containers and virtual machines.

However, whether the infrastructure is physical or virtual, it often requires a great deal of hands-on configuration and care by skilled employees. And, like any manual work, it can be slow, expensive and prone to error.

Infrastructure as code fixes this. It takes many of these human-dependent steps and turns them into one-click code that can be deployed automatically and at scale.

Think about it this way. Imagine you’re building a house. The workers arrive, you explain what you want, and the house slowly takes shape while running into inevitable problems with measurements, materials and accidents.

Now, if you need to build a second house, you could do the same thing all over again while trying to remember what worked and what didn’t. Or, you can use infrastructure as code, and the second house now comes with a blueprint that is a perfect replica of the first—except, of course, this is a digital house, which means every nailed timber and pouring of concrete would be completed with one click of code.

Infrastructure as code not only recreates the first house, it does it at speed and scale so you can recreate one or a hundred houses quickly and perfectly.

The Benefits

You can see how IaC could help a big sports organization like FC Barcelona, but now imagine if they decided to buy another team in Malaysia.

Without IaC, they would have to go through the painstaking steps of arranging infrastructure to support a new website, traffic, storage, languages and everything else that goes into creating an amazing customer experience for fans in Asia.

With IaC, much of this could be done at a click. Many of the slow, manual and error-prone steps done by individual developers can be replaced by code that is quick, automatic and cost-effective.

It’s much the same for a restaurant, banks and other businesses. If a restaurant decides to open a new chain, IaC can automatically configure the servers, networks and other infrastructure used for every other restaurant chain.

With benefits like that, it’s no surprise that IaC is catching on with a growing number of companies. Total spending on IaC is expanding at a rapid 24% a year and is expected to reach about $4.5 billion by 2030.

DevOps professionals are invested, too, citing improved efficiency, reliability, compliance and troubleshooting. A recent survey found that 27% of DevOps workers are now managing every aspect of infrastructure as code.

Getting Started

While there’s a lot to like about IaC, there are also concerns among those who have yet to make a decision. Generally, these include a lack of knowledge, complexity, cost and security.

Fortunately, however, it’s never been easier to get started, and there’s a growing list of solutions such as AWS CDK, OpenTofu, Terraform and CloudFormation that can be deployed via IaC management platforms like Spacelift. When the IT provider for FC Barcelona moved forward on IaC, the solution they chose allowed for one-click deployment for their entire infrastructure and the ability to save both time and money.

Managing all your AWS infrastructure in code with a platform provides:

• Consistency and repeatability to reduce critical errors and outages

• Automation and speed to enhance developer velocity.

• Increased collaboration and visibility with a single source of truth.

• Optimized security through compliance-aligned and code-defined guardrails.

If you are struggling with the time, expense and difficulty of managing increasingly complex infrastructure, IaC can provide a simple and cost-effective solution that frees up both employees and budget for strategic initiatives of higher value.

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