From Clickops to Gitops Scaling Iac Maturity

Published on 15 Sep 2025 by Adam Lloyd-Jones

The landscape of IT infrastructure management has undergone a profound transformation, moving from manual, error-prone processes to highly automated, code-driven workflows. This evolution, often encapsulated in the journey “From ClickOps to GitOps: Scaling IaC Maturity,” represents a fundamental shift in how organizations build, deploy, and manage their digital foundations. This article will explore this journey, highlighting the critical role of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and the advanced maturity offered by GitOps, drawing extensively from modern insights into microservices, cloud computing, and DevOps practices.

The dawn of automation: moving beyond clickOps

In the not-so-distant past, IT infrastructure was predominantly managed through manual processes, a practice often dubbed “ClickOps”. System administrators would meticulously set up hardware, install software, and configure networks by physically touching servers or navigating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). This traditional approach was characterized by several significant drawbacks:

Time-Consuming and Slow: Provisioning multiple servers or making changes was inherently slow, with each resource requiring individual configuration. This caused significant delays in project timelines and hampered responsiveness to business needs.
Error-Prone and Inconsistent: Manual configurations were highly susceptible to human error, leading to inconsistencies across environments and unexpected issues. Without clear records, replicating configurations or troubleshooting became exceedingly difficult.
Limited Scalability: Managing a small number of resources might have been straightforward, but scaling up to hundreds of virtual machines, databases, or networks across different stages (development, testing, staging, production) quickly became unwieldy. Manual scaling could not keep pace with the dynamic demands of modern operations.
Dependency on Key Individuals: Traditional deployment processes often relied on a few individuals with deep, often undocumented, knowledge of the infrastructure. This created single points of failure and significant operational risks if those individuals were unavailable.
Deployment Fear: Updating code for a monolith, for example, was a risky, “all or nothing” affair where a single change could break the entire application, leading to downtime and slowing the pace of development.

The limitations of ClickOps underscored the urgent need for a more structured, automated, and error-resistant method for managing infrastructure. This necessity gave rise to Infrastructure as Code (IaC).

The pillars of infrastructure as code

IaC fundamentally transforms infrastructure management by treating infrastructure configurations as code. This means defining the entire infrastructure—from servers and networks to databases and storage—in machine-readable definition files that can be managed, versioned, and automated. The core idea is to apply software development tools and practices, such as version control systems (VCS), automated testing, and deployment orchestration, to infrastructure management.

The benefits of adopting IaC are transformative:

Complexity Management: IaC provides a structured way to manage complexity by breaking down intricate applications into smaller, simpler, and manageable chunks with hard boundaries, preventing entangled code. Even though the overall system may be complex, individual components remain understandable.
Consistency and Reliability: IaC ensures consistency across all environments (development, testing, production) by using the same code definitions. This minimizes errors and discrepancies, ensuring that applications behave identically across stages and enhancing overall reliability.
Speed and Agility: By automating provisioning and configuration, IaC significantly accelerates development and deployment processes. It allows teams to respond swiftly to market shifts, customer demands, and emerging technologies, fostering an agile development workflow.
Scalability and Flexibility: IaC enables dynamic scalability and elasticity, allowing organizations to provision the same sets of resources in different regions or for different customers without rewriting code. Resources can be automatically adjusted in real-time based on demand, optimizing cost efficiency.
Self-Service and Collaboration: IaC empowers developers to provision their own infrastructure automatically, reducing bottlenecks and dependency on a few key individuals. With version control, multiple team members can collaborate on the same codebase, tracking changes, and reviewing modifications efficiently.
Documentation and Auditability: The infrastructure definition files serve as living documentation, clearly outlining the state of the infrastructure. This creates a natural audit trail, providing visibility into what was changed, why, and by whom.
Reduced Risk and Deployment Fear: The ability to effortlessly rebuild any part of the infrastructure from code reduces much of the risk and fear associated with making changes. Failures can be handled quickly and with confidence, and environments can be provisioned with little effort.

Terraform: the declarative powerhouse for IaC

Among the various IaC tools that emerged, Terraform from HashiCorp has become a leading solution. Its popularity stems from being open source, multi-platform, and cloud-agnostic, working seamlessly with major cloud providers like Azure, AWS, and GCP, as well as Kubernetes.

A distinguishing feature of Terraform is its use of a declarative configuration language (HashiCorp Configuration Language or HCL). Unlike imperative tools that specify how to achieve a desired state step-by-step, declarative tools like Terraform specify what the desired end state of the infrastructure should be. Terraform then takes responsibility for figuring out the necessary actions to transition from the current state to the desired state. This approach simplifies infrastructure management by removing the need to write complex migration scripts and enabling easy rollback to previous versions.

The typical Terraform workflow involves a few key commands:

init: Initializes the working directory, downloading necessary providers and modules.
plan: Generates an execution plan, showing exactly what Terraform will create, update, or destroy without actually making changes. This step is crucial for visibility and risk reduction.
apply: Executes the changes defined in the plan, provisioning or modifying the infrastructure in the cloud.
destroy: Tears down all resources managed by the Terraform configuration.

Terraform state management is a critical aspect, as Terraform tracks the real-world infrastructure against its configuration in a state file. For collaborative teams, storing this state in remote backends (e.g., Azure Storage, AWS S3) is essential, along with state locking, to ensure consistency and prevent concurrent modifications.

Terraform strongly encourages modularity and reusability. Teams can build small, composable, testable, and releasable Terraform modules that encapsulate pieces of infrastructure. This allows developers to reuse proven, tested, and documented infrastructure components, significantly accelerating development and increasing reliability. For instance, a canonical module could define how to deploy a microservice, including clustering, scaling, and traffic distribution, enabling other teams to leverage it with minimal code.

While HCL is Terraform’s native language, tools like the Cloud Development Kit for Terraform (CDKTF) allow developers to define infrastructure using familiar general-purpose programming languages such as TypeScript. However, it’s important to note that the core learning curve in IaC is often about the underlying concepts and best practices, rather than just the language syntax.

From IaC to continuous delivery: automating the pipeline

The true potential of IaC is unlocked through automation, particularly through Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) pipelines. Manual deployments are unsustainable for modern, rapidly evolving applications, especially those built on microservices architectures, which inherently increase the number of independent deployments.

Continuous Integration (CI) serves as a foundational step, automating tests on every code change to detect issues early and provide fast feedback. This practice is crucial for maintaining high-quality code and is a stepping stone to full continuous delivery.
Continuous Delivery (CD) extends CI by automating the entire deployment process, ensuring that every code change is ready for production at any time. A CD pipeline often incorporates the CI pipeline with the crucial addition of automated deployment.

The benefits of CD are substantial:

Faster and More Reliable Releases: Automated processes execute deployment steps much quicker and more consistently than manual efforts, drastically reducing errors and speeding up releases.
Reduced Deployment Fear: The ability to make small, frequent, and low-risk changes with automated rollbacks reduces the anxiety associated with deployments.
Audit Trail: The history of automated deployments forms a clear audit trail, documenting changes, their triggers, and the individuals responsible.
Scalability for Microservices: CD is indispensable for microservices, allowing independent deployment of each service, which is vital for managing many small, upgradeable components. Success with microservices hinges on robust, automated deployment pipelines.

Popular tools for building CI/CD pipelines include GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines. Before automating, it’s often recommended to perform the deployment process manually to fully understand the steps being automated. Shell scripts can codify deployment commands, which are then integrated into the automated workflow.

Automated testing is paramount within CD pipelines. This includes unit, integration, and end-to-end tests to ensure the reliability and robustness of microservices. Practicing deployments and tests on staging or pre-production environments before pushing to live is a critical best practice.

Scaling IaC maturity to GitOps

The pinnacle of IaC maturity is often considered to be GitOps, an operational framework that extends DevOps best practices to infrastructure automation. In a GitOps model, the Git repository becomes the single source of truth for both application and infrastructure code.

The core principles of GitOps include:

Declarative Infrastructure: All infrastructure is defined declaratively, typically using tools like Terraform (for infrastructure) and Kubernetes YAML (for container orchestration).
Version Control as Source of Truth: Every change to the infrastructure is represented as a commit in Git, providing a complete, auditable history and enabling easy rollbacks. This eliminates the chaos of local deployments by centralizing changes.
Automated Reconciliation: Specialized controllers continuously observe the actual state of the infrastructure and automatically reconcile it with the desired state declared in Git. If there’s a drift, the system brings it back into alignment.
CI/CD Integration: Changes committed to Git trigger automated CI/CD pipelines that build, test, and deploy the infrastructure. The pull request (PR) process is central to this workflow, where automated tests and code reviews ensure quality before merging changes to the main branch.

Benefits of GitOps for Scaling IaC Maturity:

Enhanced Security and Compliance: Git provides a natural audit trail for all infrastructure changes, and policies can be enforced as code (e.g., using Open Policy Agent or Pulumi’s CrossGuard) to ensure compliance with stringent security policies.
Increased Reliability and Consistency: Automated, Git-driven processes drastically reduce human error and ensure that infrastructure is always in a consistent, desired state.
Faster, More Frequent Deployments: GitOps encourages small, frequent, and low-risk changes, enabling continuous improvement and rapid iteration.
Improved Collaboration: Teams work on shared, version-controlled infrastructure definitions, fostering transparency and reducing conflicts.
Disaster Recovery: In the event of a catastrophic failure, the entire infrastructure can be quickly rebuilt from the authoritative state defined in Git.

Challenges and Considerations: While GitOps offers significant advantages, its implementation comes with its own set of challenges. It introduces a higher level of complexity due to distributed logic and the need to manage multiple services. The learning curve for developers and operations teams can be steep, requiring proficiency in tools like Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform/Pulumi, and various CI/CD platforms. However, investment in skills, automation, and tooling makes all the difference. It is important to note that the transition doesn’t have to be an “all or nothing” decision; a hybrid approach, where a monolith is gradually refactored or complemented by a constellation of microservices, is often a pragmatic starting point. Starting simple and iterating is a key philosophy for success.

Conclusion: the future of IaC maturity

The journey from “ClickOps” to “GitOps” marks a pivotal evolution in infrastructure management, transforming it from a manual, reactive chore into a strategic, automated, and continuously improving discipline. IaC, with tools like Terraform and Pulumi, provides the foundational capability to define infrastructure in code, bringing consistency, speed, and scalability. Layering Continuous Delivery practices on top ensures that infrastructure changes are robust, frequent, and reliable. Finally, GitOps establishes a framework where Git acts as the single source of truth, driving all infrastructure changes and operations through a declarative, version-controlled, and automated workflow.

This maturation process empowers teams to manage complex, distributed systems, particularly microservices applications, with unprecedented efficiency and confidence. However, this journey is never truly “finished”. It demands continuous learning and adaptation to emerging technologies like AI, machine learning, serverless architectures, and edge computing. Organizations must continuously invest in automation, foster a culture of shared responsibility, and refine their processes to stay competitive and resilient in the dynamic IT landscape. By embracing the principles of IaC and GitOps, teams can unlock the full potential of their cloud infrastructure, allowing them to focus on delivering business value rather than being bogged down by operational overhead.

Adam Lloyd-Jones

Adam is a privacy-first SaaS builder, technical educator, and automation strategist. He leads modular infrastructure projects across AWS, Azure, and GCP, blending deep cloud expertise with ethical marketing and content strategy.