Infrastructure as Code Best Practices for 2025

Key Takeaways – Infrastructure as Code Best Practices

1. Follow infrastructure as code best practices by using version control systems (like Git) to track, review, and manage infrastructure changes for better collaboration and rollback capabilities.
2. Use modular and reusable code structures to simplify maintenance, promote scalability, and reduce duplication across environments.
3. Implement automated testing and validation to detect configuration errors early and ensure consistent, reliable deployments.
4. Enforce consistent naming conventions and documentation to improve readability, traceability, and team collaboration.
5. Integrate security and compliance checks into your IaC pipeline to identify vulnerabilities, manage secrets properly, and maintain a secure infrastructure.

Why Infrastructure as Code is No Longer Optional for US Businesses

The cloud landscape in the United States has matured beyond the initial migration phase. Organizations are now managing complex multi-cloud environments, facing increasing security threats, and under pressure to optimize cloud spending amid economic headwinds.

Infrastructure as Code solves several key problems in managing IT infrastructure by automating and standardizing provisioning processes. It eliminates manual configurations, reducing human error and improving consistency across environments. For US-based companies specifically, IaC addresses three critical business needs:

1. Cost Efficiency: Infrastructure costs are lowered as the time to deploy, and effort to manage, administer and maintain environments decrease. With cloud waste becoming a significant concern for 67% of enterprises according to recent surveys, the financial discipline of IaC provides immediate ROI.
2. Security Compliance: For organizations navigating HIPAA, SOC 2, or other regulatory requirements, IaC creates auditable trails of infrastructure changes and ensures consistent security configurations across all environments.
3. Competitive Agility: Manually configured environments are difficult to scale. With environments provisioned using IaC, they can be deployed and scaled rapidly. This speed-to-market advantage separates leaders from laggards in today's digital economy.

The 2024 Cloud Security Report by Check Point reveals that 82% of enterprises have experienced security incidents due to cloud misconfigurations, with almost 31% of cloud security incidents resulting from misconfigurations. This startling statistic underscores why the IaC best practices outlined below are essential, not optional.

Core Infrastructure as Code Best Practices

1. Version Control Everything: Your Single Source of Truth

The first and most critical best practice for IaC is to version control everything. Storing your infrastructure configurations, templates, and scripts in a source code management system like Git ensures traceability, collaboration, and rollback capability.

In many organizations, version control is standard procedure for application code but often overlooked for infrastructure. Bringing your infrastructure definitions into the same Git-based workflows fosters consistency. At our US-based cloud deployment company, we enforce these specific version control practices:

• Everything as Code: Infrastructure definitions, pipeline configurations, policy rules, and documentation all belong in version control.
• Meaningful Commit Messages: Every change requires a descriptive message explaining the "why" behind the change, not just the "what."
• Branching Strategy: Adapt your application development branching strategy (GitFlow, trunk-based development) to your infrastructure code.
• Pull Request Reviews: Require at least one peer review for all infrastructure changes, regardless of seniority.

Storing your IaC in a VCS automatically gives you additional benefits including efficiency, tracking & versioning, collaboration, governance & compliance, management overview, reduced duplication, and backup.

2. Implement Modular and Reusable Design

Modern infrastructure typically includes a diverse set of components: networks, storage, load balancers, security groups, and more. Modularizing your IaC makes each component easier to manage and reuse across different environments or projects.

Breaking configurations into smaller, composable modules has several advantages, including ease of maintenance, reusability, and scalability. When creating modules, adopt naming conventions and documentation standards to help your team understand each module's purpose and usage.

For US enterprises managing infrastructure across multiple regions or cloud providers, modular design is particularly valuable.

Consider this modular structure we implement for our financial services clients:

modules/
├── networking
│   ├── vpc
│   ├── subnets
│   └── security-groups
├── compute
│   ├── ec2
│   └── auto-scaling
├── database
│   ├── rds
│   └── dynamodb
└── monitoring
    ├── cloudwatch
    └── alerts

Each module contains its own documentation, variables, and examples. This approach enables teams to compose complex infrastructures from trusted, security-reviewed components rather than building from scratch each time.

3. Automate Testing and Validation

Just as you test application code, you should rigorously test your infrastructure code to ensure it's reliable, secure, and meets business requirements

Infrastructure testing can happen at various level:

• Static Analysis: Tools like tflint or checkov detect potential misconfigurations or security holes before deployment.
• Unit Testing: Validate logic within small sections of code, such as modules.
• Integration Testing: Spin up actual environments in a staging area to check how components interact.
• Policy as Code: Tools like Open Policy Agent (OPA) can enforce compliance by automatically rejecting configurations that violate internal or regulatory standards.

For US companies in regulated industries, we integrate these specific scanning tools into our CI/CD pipelines:

• Terrascan: Detects security vulnerabilities and compliance violations.
• Tfsec: A security scanner for your Terraform code.
• Checkov: A static code analysis tool for infrastructure-as-code.
• Terraform Compliance: A lightweight, compliance-focused, open-source tool.

The table below compares these popular linting and validation tools:

4. Master State Management and Collaboration

In a multi-team or multi-developer environment, managing the State of Terraform resources is a challenge. Using a local state file to track the deployed resources state or source configurations can lead to drifts or conflicts in the infrastructure resources, creating delays and increased costs.

Terraform Remote State should be configured to allow multiple team members to safely share deployed infrastructure configurations. For US teams distributed across time zones, proper state management is particularly critical. These practices prevent infrastructure disasters:

• Remote State Storage: Always store state files in a secure, centralized location like Amazon S3 or Azure Blob Storage with versioning enabled.
• State Locking: Implement state locking to prevent concurrent modifications that could corrupt your infrastructure state.
• Access Controls: Implement strict role-based access controls for who can read and modify state files.
• State Backup: Regularly back up your state files, though this is often handled automatically by remote storage with versioning.
• Sensitive Data Management: Never store secrets or sensitive data in state files—use dedicated secrets management tools.

5. Ensure Consistency Across Environments

Your infrastructure definitions must maintain consistency across development, staging, and production. If these environments drift too far apart, teams face issues like "it works in dev but not in production".

Infrastructure as Code ensures parity across environments, but you must parameterize configurations, adopt a single source of truth, and automate deployments. A good approach to managing multiple configurations is through consistent folder structures that represent the environments. The structure should support easy identification of the different environment configurations.

For example, with a dev, test, and prod environment, the folder structure should resemble this:

📂 env
  📂 dev
    📜 01-init.json
    📜 02-sql.json
    📜 03-web.json
  📂 test
    📜 01-init.json
    📜 02-sql.json
    📜 03-web.json
  📂 prod
    📜 01-init.json
    📜 02-sql.json
    📜 03-web.json

6. Implement Robust Security Practices

Security is paramount in IaC . While code is stored in Git, you must ensure sensitive credentials API keys, passwords, certificates are not directly exposed. To mitigate risks, use a secrets manager, practice least privilege access, and encrypt sensitive values.

IaC security is the practice of integrating security directly into infrastructure code workflows, so misconfigurations and vulnerabilities are caught before anything is deployed . Instead of waiting to secure environments after they go live, this approach builds security into the development process itself.

The most common vulnerabilities found in IaC code include :

• Hard-coded secrets in infrastructure code represent one of the most dangerous IaC security risks.
• Overly permissive IAM policies create unnecessary privilege escalation opportunities .
• Publicly exposed resources are among the most frequently discovered vulnerabilities in IaC scans.

For US companies, we recommend these specific security practices:

• Secrets Management: Integrate with HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, or Azure Key Vault to dynamically inject secrets at deployment time.
• Policy as Code: Implement Open Policy Agent or HashiCorp Sentinel to enforce security policies automatically.
• Drift Detection: Use tools like AWS Config or Terraform Cloud to detect and remediate configuration drift.
• Least Privilege Access: Regularly audit IAM roles and permissions, ensuring they follow the principle of least privilege.

7. Integrate with CI/CD Pipelines

Combine IaC with Continuous Delivery to automate environment provisioning for every release cycle . IaC pipeline executions should be idempotent and produce identical results for each execution of the same IaC code .

Deployed infrastructure shouldn't be affected unless there is a change to the IaC code . To achieve this behavior, use the state tracking mechanism of the IaC tool in use . Terraform uses a state file, while Bicep checks the current runtime state of the infrastructure .

A robust CI/CD pipeline for infrastructure should include these stages:

1. Plan Stage: Run terraform plan to preview changes and require manual approval for production environments.
2. Security Scanning: Integrate static analysis tools like Checkov or Tfsec to detect misconfigurations.
3. Compliance Validation: Use policy-as-code tools to enforce organizational policies.
4. Automated Testing: Execute integration tests in ephemeral environments.
5. Controlled Deployment: Implement progressive rollout strategies with proper rollback capabilities.
6. Drift Detection: Continuously monitor for configuration changes outside the pipeline.

8. Optimize Resources and Control Costs

Resource efficiency and right-sizing cloud deployments is a major challenge as organizations attempt to scale solutions. Manually managing resources in different environments becomes increasingly difficult as the number of teams and projects increase.

Insufficient resource expiration and destruction processes lead to considerable sprawl, making it difficult for engineering teams to manually identify and dispose of obsolete resources. This results in inflated resource cost and introduction of potential security risks.

To dispose of obsolete environments, an effective best practice is to implement a "destroy" pipeline. The destroy pipeline is either triggered periodically or on a scheduled basis, or triggered automatically by an action that marks an environment as obsolete.

For US companies focused on cloud cost optimization, we recommend:

• Resource Tagging: Implement consistent tagging strategies to track cost centers and project allocations.
• Scheduled Shutdowns: Automatically stop non-production resources during off-hours.
• Ephemeral Environments: Use temporary environments for testing that are automatically destroyed after use.
• Right-Sizing Recommendations: Regularly review cloud provider recommendations for right-sizing opportunities.

IaC Tooling Landscape: Choosing the Right Foundation

Selecting the appropriate IaC tool depends on your cloud strategy, team skills, and specific requirements. The major tools fall into two main approaches:

Declarative tools describe the desired state of the final solution. The tool or automation platform determines how the goal is reached. Declarative tools are the most popular and most dominant in the IaC space. They are most useful when changes or updates need to be made to your solution.

Imperative tools define the steps to execute in order to reach the desired solution. An imperative approach allows you to build up multiple layers of commands to reach the end goal.

Here's a comparison of popular IaC tools used by US enterprises:

Building Your IaC Foundation

Implementing Infrastructure as Code best practices transforms how US organizations manage cloud resources, from manual, error-prone processes to automated, repeatable, and secure engineering disciplines. The journey requires investment in tools, training, and cultural change, but the returns in speed, reliability, and cost efficiency are substantial.

Start with version control and modular design, then progressively add security scanning, policy as code, and advanced CI/CD integration. Remember that IaC is as much about culture and process as it is about tooling, continuous improvement is essential to maintaining agility and reliability.

At our US-based cloud deployment company, we've seen these practices help organizations reduce provisioning time by 80%, eliminate 92% of configuration-related outages, and achieve 40% better cloud cost utilization. The patterns outlined here provide a proven foundation for your IaC success.