Declarative vs Procedural tools for Infrastructure as Code

What is infrastructure code specifically? It highly depends on your particular infrastructure setup.

In the simplest case, it might be just a bunch of shell scripts and component-specific configuration files (Nginx configuration, cron jobs, and so on) stored in source control. Inside these shell scripts, you specify exact steps computer needs to take to achieve the state you need:

  1. Copy this file to that folder.
  2. Replace all occurrences of ADDRESS with mysite.com.
  3. Restart the Nginx service.
  4. Send an e-mail about successful deployment.

This is what we call procedural programming. It's not bad. For example, build steps of Continuous Integration tools such as Jenkins that are a perfect fit for a procedural ...

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