Another Centiq customer event - this time I was talking about several internal and customer projects where we’d used Infrastructure as Code principles and practices to drastically improve productivity (changes and stability) for teams. I also introduced our new SAP on Azure Platform Engineering capabilities.

Note: This article originally appeared on the Centiq Blog and on my LinkedIn the following day.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a term used to describe a collection of practices for managing IT resources via programmable interfaces, allowing infrastructure to be defined in code, rather than created through a series of human activity. Typically, infrastructure resources might include various types of network, storage, and compute components, alongside resources relating to identity and permissions.

I represented Microsoft Azure at this SAP customer and partner event, describing some of the many capabilities my Engineering Team at Centiq built in collaboration with Thames Water’s Cloud Team.

Note: The following is an extract of the transcript from an interview I gave in 2018, after my talk at the Centiq Experts Forum that year. It’s also published on the Centiq blog and more recently reproduced on my LinkedIn. Photo by Marc Newberry on Unsplash.

What are snowflake servers and why does this happen?

This is a term that comes from the Visible Ops Handbook (you can read more about it on Martin Fowler’s blog) – and essentially it’s the problem where, over time, the processes around your IT infrastructure become inconsistent. So, the reasons that choices were made becomes lost as different people manage different systems — and trying to keep them alive becomes a real manual, and therefore error-prone, process.