How do you manage the lifecycle of cloud-native applications using IaC?

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) automates the definition and management of infrastructure resources such as compute nodes and network components through code, ensuring the repeatability and consistency of the cloud-native application lifecycle, including development, deployment, and scaling. Its importance lies in eliminating manual operation errors and improving efficiency, and it is widely used in DevOps processes and Kubernetes environments to support elastic deployments.

Core components include declarative configuration templates (e.g., Terraform HCL) and version control systems. The principle is to automatically execute deployment, monitoring, and updates, integrating with continuous integration tools (e.g., Jenkins) to trigger application updates. In practical applications, IaC manages the runtime environment of microservices, significantly enhancing fault tolerance, optimizing resource scaling, and promoting the standardization of the cloud-native ecosystem.

Implementation steps: Select an IaC tool (e.g., Pulumi), define YAML templates to describe cluster and microservice requirements, automate testing, deployment, and application scaling through CI/CD pipelines, and audit changes with version control. A typical scenario is the launch of Kubernetes applications, with business values including a 20-30% reduction in operational costs, shortened deployment time, and improved business continuity.