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Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) is the DevOps tactic of managing and provisioning software infrastructures through machine-readable definition files, rather than manual 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 and practices in the academic literature. At the same time, a considerable amount of grey literature exists on IaC. Thus we aim to characterize IaC and compile a catalog of best and bad practices for widely used IaC languages, all using grey literature materials.

In this paper, we systematically analyze the industrial grey literature on IaC, such as blog posts, tutorials, white papers using qualitative analysis techniques.

We proposed a definition for IaC and distilled a broad catalog summarized in a …