IAC is one technology I will defend to the hilt. IAC is difficult because the underlying problem it is trying to solve is hard. Different people over time are m

IAC is one technology I will defend to the hilt. IAC is difficult because the underlying problem it is trying to solve is hard. Different people over time are making updates to a mission-critical, stateful, system that need to be coordinated with each other. IAC is complicated, tedious, poorly documented, risky to deploy, and never perfectly aligns with what is actually going on in production but it is still better; a lot better. Manual infrastructure is also all of these things except you have nothing to grab onto if you are trying to understand an environment and what is safe to change. If your app is very simple and you can use an out of the box solution, you should avoid IAC. But the moment you want to do something custom you need it.