Glossary terms - I

Terms beginning with I describe how environments are defined and exposed — container images, immutable infrastructure, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and ingress. Each entry is a clear, quotable definition.

2 terms

Infrastructure patterns
Immutable infrastructure
Immutable infrastructure is a delivery pattern where servers, containers and runtime environments are never modified after they are provisioned - to change anything you build a new image and replace the old instance whole. Configuration drift becomes impossible, every running version maps to a known build, and rollback is just bringing the previous image back.
Infrastructure patterns
Infrastructure as Code
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the practice of declaring servers, networks, queues and other cloud resources in version-controlled files - typically Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation or Ansible - so an automated tool, not a human in a console, provisions them. Every environment becomes reproducible, every change reviewable, and rebuilding from scratch is one command.