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Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) is the DevOps tactic of managing and provisioning infrastructure through machine-readable definition files, rather than physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools. From a maintenance and evolution perspective, the topic has picked the interest of practitioners and academics alike, given the relative scarcity of supporting patterns, best practices, tools, and software engineering techniques. Using the data coming from 44 semistructured interviews to senior developers of as many companies, in this paper we shed light on the state of the practice in the adoption of IaC and the key software engineering challenges in the field. Particularly, we investigate (i) how practitioners adopt and develop IaC, (ii) which support is currently available, i.e., the typically used tools and their advantages/disadvantages, and (iii) what are the practitioner's needs when dealing with IaC …