Most of the talks are dedicated to the happy paths, but not this one. This talk is about a set of challenges you can encounter while adopting your favorite "Infrastructure as Code(IaC)" tool. It also covers viable templating and scaling approaches for major rivals - Terraform, Pulumi, and Azure Bicep.

Key topics:

- Optimal adoption approach for Azure Bicep - a simple and free IaC for Azure.
- Bicep scalability, problems, and practical templating approach for this JSON-based "Domain Specific Language" (DSL).
- Pulumi adoption via C# to build a clean code project for your IaC.
- Challenges of growing with the free command line interface(CLI) and the SaaS versions of Pulumi, obstacles to its adoption by DevOps Engineers.
- DevOps engineer's favorite - Terraform, YAML-based DSL, which has become the standard for operations teams across big companies.
- Terraform templating approach and the need for a better programming model.
- Terraform scaling challenges with a free CLI, SaaS, multiple stacks, and data sources.
- Impact of HashiCopr license conflict on Terraform community.
- IaC adoption flow comparison between different types of companies, engineering, and operations teams.
- Lessons learned from projects as an engineer and from the audits of other companies as an architect.
- Bootstrapping your own private AI LLM with project templates for great results.

Join this talk to learn about adopting and scaling Infrastructure as Code tooling, best practices, how to structure templates and lessons learned from implementation.