In a typical infrastructure build, developers and IT operation teams work coherently to plan, code, develop, and deploy application infrastructure by creating multiple instances and environments to code, test, and run their applications in. However, many complications can arise during the manual development and operations processes within such a build pipeline. Human fallibility is inevitable in any scenario where repetitive manual processes are the norm and everyone is guilty of making mistakes at work; dev and ops engineers are no different. The consequences of such mistakes are that the build process takes more time, energy, and resources to identify and fix errors in the pipeline so the whole process is affected, delayed, and more costly than planned.
As part of this typical infrastructure build pipeline, development and operations teams are also responsible for individually maintaining multiple deployment environments. Managing multiple environments is a further difficulty to shoulder with each of them operating to its own configuration settings.