Question

A cloud engineering team wants to define infrastructure so they simply describe the target end state (number of instances, network configuration, and load balancer settings), and the tool automatically determines the steps needed to reach that state during each run. They do not want to write explicit step-by-step provisioning commands. Which IaC approach best meets this requirement?

Accepted Answer

Declarative configuration, where the desired end state is specified and the tool reconciles the actual state to match

Answer

Imperative scripting, where each provisioning command is written in sequence to build the environment

Answer

Manual provisioning through the cloud console with documented runbooks for each resource

Answer

Procedural shell scripts triggered by cron to recreate resources on a schedule