Infrastructure as Code
by Kief Morris
The book that named the patterns and anti-patterns I was already fighting — light on code, heavy on judgment.
- Status
- Read · December 2020
- Bought
- December 19, 2020
- For
- Platform & SRE engineers · Anyone running GitOps or a homelab cluster · Teams moving from hand-built servers to declarative infra
Where it earned its place
The one-paragraph verdict
Morris is methodical, and it shows: he moves from first principles to good practice without ever feeling heavy, and his naming of anti-patterns — snowflake servers, configuration drift, the automation-fear spiral — gave words to problems I’d been firefighting blind. The public 4.15 is earned. Where it falls short is concrete code: the examples are deliberately tool-agnostic and stay shallow, so you won’t leave knowing Terraform or Ansible any better. It’s also heavily server-centric, which dates it slightly in a Kubernetes-and-GitOps world. I still treat it as the why behind every declarative decision I make, and reach for tool docs for the how.
Who should read it
Platform and SRE engineers, and anyone who has felt the dread of touching a server nobody dares rebuild. It’s most valuable early — before you’ve calcified bad habits into Bash. Skip it if you want a hands-on Terraform tutorial, or if you already think and work declaratively by reflex.
Where it earned its place
The “reproducible, disposable, consistent” mantra is exactly what I lean on with GitOps and Flux — the cluster is the artifact of a repo, not a pet I SSH into. His warnings about config drift across environments are the whole reason I reach for Kustomize overlays instead of forked, hand-edited manifests per stage.
Skip it if…
You need running code more than principles, or you’ve already internalized declarative infra in production. Veterans will find the ideas familiar, and tutorial-seekers will find it abstract. [Infrastructure as Code on Goodreads]