Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the practice of managing and provisioning infrastructure through machine-readable definition files rather than physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools.

Benefits of IaC:
- Version Control
- Reproducibility
- Automation
- Documentation
- Consistency
- Scalability

Terraform is an open-source IaC software tool that enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure. It codifies cloud APIs into declarative configuration files.

Example of a simple Terraform configuration:
<div class="code-block" data-lang="hcl"><div class="highlight"><pre><span></span><span class="kr">provider</span><span class="w"> </span><span class="nv">&quot;aws&quot;</span><span class="w"> </span><span class="p">{</span>

region = "us-west-2"
}

resource "aws_instance" "example" {
ami = "ami-0c55b159cbfafe1f0"
instance_type = "t2.micro"

tags = {
Name = "example-instance"
}
}

Ansible is an open-source automation tool that automates software provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment. It uses YAML syntax for expressing automation jobs.

Example of an Ansible playbook:
<div class="code-block" data-lang="yaml"><div class="highlight"><pre><span></span><span class="nn">---</span>

- name: Install and configure web server
hosts: webservers
become: yes

tasks:
- name: Install nginx
apt:
name: nginx
state: present

- name: Start nginx service
service:
name: nginx
state: started