This is a collection of essays on repeatable infrastructure of all sizes and types for software engineering projects. It brings together different perspectives on a discipline that avoids the lengthy manuals and distils the essence of some standards and best practices that serve the professionals in this field. Infrastructure-as-code has become just as treasured as any high value assets as software expands its reach into almost all aspects of our daily activities starting from those dedicated to specific teams and boutique purposes to commercial heavy-duty deployments at cloud scale. We are increasingly relying on automation to automatically connect our world and more so with the public cloud as the ubiquitous and universal world's computer. As we have moved towards 100% automation, we are also increasingly asking for software-defined architectures and repeatable infrastructure and deployments. While vendors, providers and template language providers advance the front in the infrastructure-ascode, this book captures and presents some concepts that professionals continue to recognize. The border between applications and infrastructure varies with perspectives, principles, processes, and practice. With a long history of software innovations and a variety in their size, purpose, applications, and customer base, some of the skirmishes on this border and time-tested truths become evident in this book. This book strives to present some of the concepts of infrastructure in the form of essays. Each essay strives to throw a distinct perspective and leaves out the chores so that the tenets stand out. Most software applications are the culmination of a strong vision and often with one or more persona that it strives to satisfy. Applications and their infrastructure cannot do without one another in their realization of this vision. While templates and the resources they describe might seem mundane compared to sophisticated algorithms, their recognition, interpretation, and deployment are just as challenging as any other code. This book paints the landscape and history in software infrastructure engineering that revolve around automated deployments. Although no individual or textbook can really be comprehensive, a bouquet of flavors is packaged in this book. Set in a lucid narrative tone in this collection, these essays strive to be an easy read. You could always keep this book on your desk. You never know when you will need the inspirations behind the solutions to the problems described in this book, to reflect - and thrive - in your field.
