Top 8 Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) Tools for 2024

​Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) has revolutionized how companies design, build, and manage IT infrastructure. IaC provides a reliable way to provision and configure infrastructure resources like servers, networks, and cloud services through machine-readable definition files rather than physical hardware configuration.

IaC enables Ops to treat infrastructure as just another piece of software—where resources can be provisioned and managed through source control and code.

Some key benefits of using IaC tools include:

• Increased Speed and Agility: IaC allows infrastructure to be provisioned and managed much faster than manual processes. This improves developer productivity and enables organizations to respond quickly to changing business needs.
• Consistency and Reliability: With IaC, you can create standardized and reusable infrastructure definitions. This reduces configuration and infrastructure drift and ensures consistency across environments.
• Cost Optimization: IaC makes it easier to spin up and tear down infrastructure as needed, leading to significant cost savings in public cloud environments.
• Documentation: The code you write for your IaC serves as documentation, providing detailed insights into the state and configuration of infrastructure.

In this comprehensive guide, we will provide an overview of the top 8 IaC tools available today, their key features, strengths and weaknesses, and common use cases.

Top infrastructure-as-code Tools for 2024

Many excellent open-source and commercial infrastructure-as-code tools exist today to help manage different aspects of your infrastructure. The top options provide capabilities, including configuration management, orchestration, provisioning, and deployment automation.

Let’s compare the three most popular IaC solutions and then jump into the eight best IaC tools list.

1. Facets

Facets is an infrastructure management platform developed by Facets.Cloud that provides a unified interface for developers and operations teams to collaborate on infrastructure automationinfrastructure automation.

It aims to simplify platform engineering by providing reusable infrastructure templates and modular building blocks that contain infrastructure definitions and best practices. Facets provides capabilities for multi-cloud infrastructure provisioning, Kubernetes cluster management, zero-touch environment provisioning, release management, and more.

Key Features

• Unified Interface: The Facets console provides a single pane of glass for developers, ops engineers, security teams, and others to collaborate on infrastructure automation. This enables end-to-end visibility.
• Extensibility: You get an extensible core that in-house developers can use as a foundation to build features. Facets handles updates and feature additions to the core while your lean team can maintain the modules built internally—giving you the best of both worlds.
• Infrastructure Templates: Ops teams can define reusable templates for provisioning, security, and more. These can then be used to build environments, define networks, security configurations, availability settings, and other aspects of cloud environments.
• Environment Provisioning: Facets automates deploying fully configured environments across regions and clouds without manual steps. This simplifies onboarding and spin-up.
• Deployment Pipelines: Facets automates full-stack software deployment workflows, including building, testing, canary launches, and promotion across environments like dev, staging, and prod. Automated approvals and integration with developer workflows enable continuous delivery.
• Release Management: Standard release pipelines can enforce approvals, automated testing, canary deployments, and staged rollouts to minimize risk.
• Compliance Guardrails: Before infrastructure changes are applied, Facets runs policy checks to validate security, regulatory compliance, and best practices based on the organization's requirements. This prevents errors and enforces standards.

Who’s Facets suitable for?

Facets is excellent for enterprises needing a unified platform for developers and Ops to collaborate on provisioning and managing complex cloud environments. It works best for regulated industries requiring compliance guardrails.

2. Ansible

​Ansible is an open-source automation tool created by Red Hat. It uses a simple YAML-based domain-specific language to describe automation tasks that can be run on remote machines over SSH. Ansible integrates seamlessly with major cloud providers and allows infrastructure definitions to be version-controlled.

Some critical components of Ansible include playbooks, roles, modules, and inventories, which provide powerful abstractions for automation. Ansible Tower provides a web-based UI, REST API, and other enterprise features.

Key Features

• Agentless: Ansible uses SSH, WinRM, and other standard protocols to connect to managed nodes without installing a software agent. This makes onboarding new systems much faster.
• Playbooks: Playbooks allow the creation of structured workflows for orchestrating tasks across hosts and groups of hosts. They provide a repeatable deployment process and procedural automation.
• Roles: Roles package together reusable components like variables, tasks, handlers, and files that can be applied to multiple hosts. This simplifies customization and sharing of configurations.
• Modules: Modules encapsulate specific system tasks like package managers, container orchestration, cloud services, etc., into reusable scripts. Ansible includes thousands of modules, and custom ones can be added.
• Inventories: Inventories provide dynamic or static ways to define the hosts and groups that playbooks run against. Complex queries and external data sources can populate dynamic inventories.

Who’s Ansible good for?

Ansible suits organizations looking to automate IT workflows like application deployments and configuration management across servers. Its agentless approach makes it great for legacy environments.

3. Terraform

​Terraform is a popular open-source infrastructure-as-code tool created by HashiCorp. It codifies cloud APIs into declarative configuration files called Terraform configuration files. These files describe the desired end-state infrastructure that Terraform can provision and manage.

Terraform can manage infrastructure across public clouds like AWS, Azure, GCP, and on-prem solutions. The Terraform Registry provides a library of reusable infrastructure components. Terraform Cloud provides governance features like access controls, policy enforcement, and secret management.

Key Features

• Execution Plans: Terraform plans give visibility into changes being applied and avoid unexpected infrastructure changes. The plans can be approved before use.
• State Management: The state file acts as a source of truth for the infrastructure environment. It enables basic change tracking and incremental application.
• Graph of Dependencies: The dependency graph models relationships between components so Terraform can orchestrate changes in the correct order.
• Plugins: Providers implement integration with cloud APIs, SaaS platforms, and tools. Hundreds exist, allowing Terraform to automate almost any infrastructure.

Who’s Terraform fit for?

Terraform is ideal for providers and teams needing to manage infrastructure across multiple cloud platforms. Its execution plans help mitigate risk during provisioning.

4. Puppet

​Puppet is an open-source configuration management tool created by Puppet (now part of Perforce). It uses a Ruby-based domain-specific language to define system configurations that should be enforced across machines. The Puppet agent polls the Puppet master to periodically apply this desired state.

Puppet provides modules and manifests for describing system components, their states, and the relationships between them. Puppet Enterprise adds enterprise-ready capabilities like role-based access control, orchestration, and visualization.

Key Features

• Declarative Language: Puppet's DSL allows you to specify the desired system state concisely vs. imperatively step-by-step. Software agents enforce this state.
• Resource Abstraction: Resources provide a unified way to model system components like files, packages, and users. Providers implement resource types on backends.
• Idempotent: Puppet manifests can be applied repeatedly but will converge to the same system state. This makes execution order flexible.
• Agent/Master Architecture: Agents poll the master periodically and apply the compiled catalog. Enables centralized orchestration.

Who’s Puppet good for?

Puppet works well for organizations with large server fleets needing robust configuration management across data centers and cloud infrastructure.

5. Chef

​Chef is an open-source configuration management tool written in Ruby and Erlang. The critical components of this tool include cookbooks, recipes, resources, and the Chef Workstation for authoring. Chef uses a masterless architecture where each node periodically polls the Chef server to apply the latest configurations.

Chef provides reusable definitions for automating infrastructure, compliance, security, and application deployment workflows. Chef Habitat offers middleware automation capabilities as well. Chef Automate provides visibility into compliance and audit events across the deployment lifecycle.

Key Features

• Cookbooks and Recipes: Cookbooks contain recipes that declare all the resources needed to configure a component or system using Ruby DSL.
• Resources: Resources abstract basic system building blocks with common properties that can be declaratively defined.
• Chef Workstation: Desktop app for authoring cookbooks/recipes, testing them locally, managing Chef repos and configurations.
• Chef Habitat: With the Habitat feature, you can automate the config and lifecycle of packaged apps and middleware through application modeling.
• Supermarket: Public repo containing cookbooks, recipes, and other reusable configuration data created by the Chef community.

Who’s Chef good for?

Chef is best for regulated enterprises needing to automate and enforce security, compliance, and governance policies across infrastructure and applications.

6. AWS CloudFormation

​AWS CloudFormation is Amazon Web Services' infrastructure as a code tool. It allows users to describe and provision their AWS resources in CloudFormation templates. These templates can be version-controlled and represent the desired end state of resources.

CloudFormation manages the provisioning of resources and dependency resolution across components and provides drift detection to detect changes. The CloudFormation registry contains additional resources created by AWS and the community.

Key Features

• Templates: JSON or YAML files that declaratively define the AWS resources that should be provisioned and their configurations.
• Stacks: Stacks instantiate a template to manage all the associated resources as a single unit throughout their lifecycle.
• Change Sets: Change sets preview the changes to resources made by a stack operation before executing it.
• Drift Detection: Drift detection identifies differences between actual resource properties in AWS and expected properties defined in templates.
• Nested Stacks: Nested stacks enable the reuse of existing templates inside other templates. Useful for modular, component-based architecture.

Who’s AWS CloudFormation good for?

CloudFormation is designed for AWS customers wanting simplified provisioning and lifecycle management of groups of related AWS resources.

7. Pulumi

​Pulumi is a modern infrastructure-as-code tool that lets users define cloud resources using real programming languages like JavaScript, TypeScript, Go, and Python instead of domain-specific languages. This allows existing tech to be used for infrastructure automation.

Pulumi provides libraries for all major cloud platforms. The Pulumi engine transforms program language constructs into API calls to provision and manage resources. Pulumi Automation API also helps infrastructure to be provisioned dynamically through code.

Key Features

• Component Architecture: Components and libraries allow reusable abstractions over infrastructure code creation.
• State Diff: Detects drift based on diffing actual resource state versus expected Pulumi resource state.
• Automation API: Provides programmatic control over dynamically creating, updating, and deleting resources.
• Compliance: Compliance as code can be achieved in Pulumi by embedding assertions and policy packs that enforce organizational standards.

Who’s Pulumi good for?

Pulumi is generally good for modern tech teams wanting to use existing programming languages to code their IaC instead of learning a completely new language from scratch.

8. Salt

Salt is an open-source infrastructure automation and management tool written in Python. It uses an agent/master architecture where the Salt master controls the infrastructure configuration through remote execution across the agent nodes.

Salt provides a domain-specific language for declaring infrastructure states called SLS (SaLt State). The states describe the ideal form of a system, including packages, services, users, and more. With Salt, you can automate infrastructure across data centers, clouds, and edge locations with minimal effort.

Key Features

• Infrastructure as Data: Salt uses a declarative approach where system states and configurations are defined as data structures rather than imperative procedures.
• State Files: SLS state files use Salt state syntax to declaratively define how systems should be configured and resources should be managed.
• Event-driven Automation: Salt reactors trigger automated responses when events occur on the master or minions. Enables automation workflows.
• Grains: Grains expose system properties like OS type that can be used in target expressions to tailor states based on system attributes.
• Python Extensibility: Salt is written in Python and exposes interfaces, enabling users to easily extend functionality by writing custom modules and engines in Python.
• SaltEngines: SaltEngines provides long-running processes on the master to enable event listening, job handling, sessions, and other automation capabilities.

Who’s Salt good for?

Salt suits organizations needing full-stack automation, configuration management, and orchestration across servers, networks, and data center infrastructure.

What to Look for When Choosing an IaC Tool

The choice of IaC tool can be difficult, considering how many options there are in the market. And every available tool has a very similar offering. Here are some key considerations when choosing an IaC tool for your organization.

Extensibility

Make extensibility your priority. Extensibility refers to an IaC tool's ability to extend its capabilities to meet evolving infrastructure needs. Tools with modular architectures that integrate third-party plugins or even allow custom development without disruption can be great for the long term.

One tool that stands out is Facets. It is designed with a highly extensible core that lets your dev team create custom integrations without investing too many resources in the development. It exposes core APIs so you can integrate custom workflows along with their own pre-designed integrations.

And more integration and customization options through exposed interfaces let you accommodate changing organizational use cases over time, giving you a tool you can rely on over the longer term.

Cloud Platform Support

Cloud platforms supported by a tool dictate the environments it can manage.

When most of your internally used tools are already hosted on the cloud, it makes sense that the IaC tool of your choice supports them, too. If your IaC tool can support multi-cloud environments, it can reduce your dependency on a single cloud platform, thus eliminating vendor lock-in issues.

Along with that, hybrid cloud support also helps with managing on-prem infrastructure alongside the public cloud.

Language and Syntax

Consider the programming languages and skills your team already has. Choosing a tool that uses languages like Python or TypeScript that your engineers are familiar with can minimize the learning curve and speed up adoption across the organization.

Also, think about what style of writing infrastructure-as-code suits your team—declarative, focused on the desired end state, or imperative, with step-by-step procedures. Choose a syntax that aligns with your preferences and makes your infrastructure code readable and maintainable.

Features

Carefully review the feature set through the lens of your organization's current and future needs. The focus should be on the most important features like core resource provisioning, access controls, and compliance guardrails that are essential for your infrastructure environments and maturity level.

Resist the temptation to over-scope tools with advanced features. You can always use community integrations and plugins to extend your toolchain over time—or even develop some yourself.

The ideal feature set fills your organization's needs and aligns with your infrastructure management priorities today and tomorrow. Features should empower, not overwhelm, your engineers.

The features of a tool depend on its underlying architecture.

Architecture

Consider how the IaC tool's architecture fits your infrastructure environments and scale. If you prefer decentralized control and management, evaluate "masterless" tools that don't require external orchestrators. Or, if you have complex workflows, assess centralized tools with unified control planes.

Also, factor in your connectivity constraints—are there reliability requirements to manage infrastructure offline or in low-bandwidth environments?

Maturity and Community

And finally, verify that the tool's production use cases match your organization's scale and environment. Longevity demonstrates stability—but ensure that recent versions of the tool show regular updates and feature additions.

Choose IaC tools with strong adoption or financial support, signaling they'll have long-term support instead of being abandoned.

The goal of considering all factors is to future-proof the foundation of your infrastructure since switching IaC tools can be a hassle once you have everything set up.

Experience The Future of Enterprise Infrastructure as Code

Infrastructure-as-code transforms how modern organizations manage and provision infrastructure and environments. As we have seen, IaC enables increased efficiency, reliability, and agility by codifying configurations, automating provisioning, and integrating with CI/CD pipelines.

Facets stands out as a powerful option for businesses. It unlocks a new model of platform engineering, breaking down the silos between developers and operations.

With its unified interface, built-in best practices, and tight integrations with major cloud providers, Facets helps even the most complex organizations simplify and accelerate cloud delivery. The reusable infrastructure templates and deployment pipelines codify organizational security, compliance, and availability standards, easing the management burden.

While open-source tools provide flexibility, Facets offers enterprise-grade capabilities not found in lighter-weight solutions.

Want to see how Facets can help you optimize your SDLC workflows? Book a 1:1 demo today!