[mping]

Infrastructure as code. You define your infra in a couple of files, then terraform builds it against eg: aws.

[kristopolous]

Through what? The aws cli tool?

Why would I need to encode something like that? Are you talking about maybe having identical setups in different parts of the world?

[bdsa]

You would encode it for the same reason we use source control - confidence that what is deployed matches some kind of record of it.

In development we don't send archives of code to each other (OK, some people do I guess) and in infrastructure we don't click around in AWS to make changes