In this chapter, you learned about the concept of infrastructure and configuration as code, its value, and how to use it in practice. For implementing these, you learned about ARM templates, the IaC mechanism for Azure. You also learned about PowerShell DSC for managing the configuration of virtual machines and about different techniques for managing the configuration of your applications. Finally, you learned about several other tools available in the market. You learned which tool can be used in which situation and whether these tools can integrate with Azure DevOps.

With this knowledge, you are now able to start describing the infrastructure and configuration of your application(s) in source control using one or more of the tools you have read about. You are also capable of setting up the means to deliver the infrastructure using automation, either from a release pipeline or using dedicated infrastructure management tools. But no matter which solution you choose, you now have the capabilities to incorporate infrastructure into your DevOps processes.

In the next chapter, you will learn about another challenge you might encounter when implementing DevOps practices: databases. When increasing the speed at which features flow to production, you may also have to change the way you manage your database schema and how you apply changes. The next chapter will discuss this subject.