Articles
| Open Access | Codifying Resilience and Governance: Infrastructure as Code as the Architectural Backbone of Multi-Cloud Enterprise Deployment Ecosystems
Alejandro R. Villeneuve , Université de Montréal, CanadaAbstract
The accelerating adoption of multi-cloud strategies by contemporary enterprises has fundamentally transformed how digital infrastructure is designed, governed, and operationalized. Organizations are no longer constrained by monolithic data centers or single-vendor cloud platforms but instead orchestrate complex portfolios of heterogeneous infrastructure resources that span public clouds, private environments, and edge systems. Within this context, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has emerged not merely as a technical convenience but as a foundational governance and architectural paradigm that determines how reliably, securely, and ethically digital infrastructures evolve. This study develops a comprehensive theoretical and empirical interpretation of how IaC functions as the central coordinating logic of multi-cloud enterprises, enabling resilience, regulatory compliance, and continuous innovation while simultaneously introducing new organizational and technological risks. Drawing on a rigorously constrained literature base that includes seminal industry engineering narratives, formal standardization frameworks, and recent academic analyses of IaC evolution, the article situates the work of Dasari (2025) as a pivotal articulation of enterprise-grade IaC best practices, positioning it within broader debates about automation, semantic stability, and platform governance.The abstract argues that IaC should be understood as a socio-technical system rather than a simple scripting practice. By encoding infrastructure decisions into declarative and procedural artifacts, enterprises externalize architectural intent into version-controlled repositories that can be audited, replicated, and algorithmically validated. This transformation alters power relations within organizations, redistributing control from manual operations teams toward cross-functional DevOps and platform engineering units, as documented in large-scale engineering organizations such as Netflix, Shopify, and Spotify (Netflix Tech Blog, 2022; Shopify Engineering, 2023; Spotify Engineering, 2023). At the same time, regulatory and security imperatives articulated by financial institutions and energy infrastructure authorities impose new constraints on how IaC pipelines must be designed and governed (Capital One Tech, 2023; IEEE Power and Energy Society, 2023). The abstract synthesizes these strands to propose that enterprise multi-cloud success increasingly depends on the semantic integrity, policy alignment, and lifecycle governance of IaC artifacts, rather than on the underlying cloud platforms themselves.Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative meta-synthesis of academic and practitioner sources, using interpretive analysis to extract recurring patterns, tensions, and emergent design principles. This approach enables the identification of core architectural logics that underpin successful multi-cloud IaC deployments, including immutability, idempotence, policy-as-code, and modular abstraction. The findings suggest that organizations that align IaC practices with continuous delivery pipelines and standardized configuration management frameworks achieve superior operational resilience and auditability, confirming and extending prior empirical claims about automation and performance (Rani and Sharma, 2022; Singh and Gupta, 2023; Humble and Farley, 2010). However, the abstract also highlights unresolved challenges, particularly around semantic versioning, cross-tool interoperability, and the governance of evolving infrastructure components, echoing concerns raised in analyses of Ansible role evolution and multi-cloud orchestrator performance (Opdebeeck et al., 2020; de Carvalho and de Araujo, 2020).By integrating these perspectives, the article contributes a theoretically grounded and practically relevant framework for understanding IaC as the institutional memory and regulatory spine of multi-cloud enterprises. It concludes that future research and practice must move beyond tool-centric debates toward a more holistic conception of IaC as an evolving organizational capability that mediates between technological possibility and socio-economic responsibility.
Keywords
DevOps automation, Infrastructure as Code, Multi-cloud governance
References
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Copyright (c) 2025 Alejandro R. Villeneuve

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