[avrionov]

The term makes a lot of sense if you know when and how it was introduced. When the early proponents of "Infrastructure As Code" started to write about it, the infrastructure was defined often time in multiple config files or directly in the UI of tools like load balancers, firewalls, proxies, etc. The big value of the movement for me at least was the proposal to threat the infrastructure definitions and the corresponding scripts as code: - all infrastructure definitions are under source control. - there is well defined process how the changes are made with review and approval process. - the infrastructure can be reproduced and re created for integration environments, load testing, staging etc. - using a common language like Teraform allows better visibility, helps with code reviews, etc.

The cloud providers enabled all that.

To summarize: even if most of "Infrastructure As Code" is implemented via descriptive language and not procedural, it still follows the best software development practices.

[Gravityloss]

Yes, you apply some software development principles: version control, builds, continuous integration, versioning, automation.

The software industry is stupendously large and has invested a lot of person centuries to these concepts and tooling. They have been able to create these tools for themselves because the tools are software. These hard won fruits of labor could be applied to many fields, and are.

Of course some tooling doesn't fit so well directly, there needs to be some adaptation of the concept, and writing of new software and creation of new processes.