Municipal cloud ops wants networks, VMs, and load balancers declared once and applied the same way every time. Which approach best meets that need?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Think of writing the road map once and letting automation pave it instead of redrawing streets by hand every Monday. Infrastructure as code declares networks, VMs, and load balancers so they land the same way every run.
Full Explanation
Infrastructure as code templates declaratively define networks, VMs, load balancers, and related resources so the same desired state can be applied repeatably across municipal environments. That approach meets the need to declare once and provision the same way every time. Documenting each click path in a shared spreadsheet fails because manual click recipes drift and cannot reliably reproduce complex graphs of resources. Nightly manual rebuilds guided only by tribal knowledge fail consistency, auditability, and staffing resilience. Screenshot archives of the console as the sole source of truth fail because images are not executable desired state and cannot be planned or diffed cleanly. Exam caveat: IaC is about declarative, repeatable provisioning—not documentation theater. Operational check: store templates in Git with review, run plan/preview in a sandbox, apply through a pipeline with least privilege, and tag civic resources for ownership and cost. In municipal platform operations, record the chosen control and the rejected alternatives in the change record so future on-call engineers understand the failure modes avoided for citizen services. Re-check the decision after the next provider feature change or compliance update to ensure the same answer still holds for the city's estate.