Achieving Infrastructure As Code

A question that I have recently considered is: For networking, what are the prerequisites for widespread adoption of "infrastructure as code"?

However, before addressing this, let me offer some clarification. What do I mean by infrastructure as code? It's a systemic way of treating your network device configurations in a manner similar to source code. This includes following robust software development practices for testing and deploying these changes to production.

For example, all network changes are first submitted into a source code repository and then undergo a series of tests. Assuming all the tests pass, the changes are approved and scheduled. Finally, the changes are automatically deployed into production.

Infrastructure as code implies that no changes are made directly to network devices; all changes must be made through the deployment system.

Now, infrastructure as code brings up several interesting questions. First, is this even a good idea? What evidence is there to support this? For server teams, does treating infrastructure as code improve their ability to meet business needs? Do they still maintain reasonable uptime and security?

Second, is the network environment significantly different from the server environment? If so, what are the implications?

I am not going to try to answer those questions today. For now, I am going to assume infrastructure as code is a good idea, and I will return to my original question: For networking, what are the prerequisites for widespread adoption of infrastructure as code?

Here are the prerequisites that I see:

There are many questions I want to explore in more detail, but infrastructure as code definitely intrigues me. Network engineers as a group need to improve how effectively we make changes in our environments to meet business needs. We need to break free of our highly manual, no-testing, make changes live in production, every device is unique mode of operating.