In a lot of ways, “infrastructure as code” is a scam designed to flatter developers and part them from their (company’s) money. It’s automation designed to conceal how much is being spent on likely-needless infrastructure by making it absurdly easy to spin up a few new instances — or a few thousand.

If I were AWS as Azure, I’d make it as easy as possible to spin up anything in an automated fashion, and would be propagandizing this capability far and wide. I’d be flattering developers that infrastructure is just code, and that you don’t need those useless old-school infrastructure people anymore to determine the best path and what is sensible. And then I’d work on making it easy for those same developers, who don’t actually understand the first thing about infrastructure, to demonstrate their superiority by deploying tons of rickety, poorly-designed “automated” infrastructure willy-nilly.

So it’s no surprise what we are seeing. It’s actually pretty brilliant. It’s a great strategy for separating the clueless from their money.