The 'as Code' Activities: Development Anti-patterns for Infrastructure as Code

TL;DR

This paper systematically investigates development anti-patterns in infrastructure as code (IaC) scripts, highlighting activities that lead to defects and providing guidance for practitioners to improve IaC quality.

Contribution

It identifies five development anti-patterns in IaC scripts through quantitative analysis and practitioner surveys, emphasizing the importance of 'as code' activities.

Findings

Five development anti-patterns related to defective IaC scripts.

Identification of activities like 'boss is not around' and 'many cooks spoil'.

Highlighting the significance of 'as code' activities for IaC quality.

Abstract

Context: The 'as code' suffix in infrastructure as code (IaC) refers to applying software engineering activities, such as version control, to maintain IaC scripts. Without the application of these activities, defects that can have serious consequences may be introduced in IaC scripts. A systematic investigation of the development anti-patterns for IaC scripts can guide practitioners in identifying activities to avoid defects in IaC scripts. Development anti-patterns are recurring development activities that relate with defective IaC scripts. Goal: The goal of this paper is to help practitioners improve the quality of infrastructure as code (IaC) scripts by identifying development activities that relate with defective IaC scripts. Methodology: We identify development anti-patterns by adopting a mixed-methods approach, where we apply quantitative analysis with 2,138 open source IaC scripts and conduct a survey with 51 practitioners. Findings: We observe five development activities to be related with defective IaC scripts from our quantitative analysis. We identify five development anti-patterns namely, 'boss is not around', 'many cooks spoil', 'minors are spoiler', 'silos', and 'unfocused contribution'. Conclusion: Our identified development anti-patterns suggest the importance of 'as code' activities in IaC because these activities are related to quality of IaC scripts.