1 research outputs found
Where Are The Gaps? A Systematic Mapping Study of Infrastructure as Code Research
Context:Infrastructure as code (IaC) is the practice to automatically
configure system dependencies and to provision local and remote instances.
Practitioners consider IaC as a fundamental pillar to implement DevOps
practices, which helps them to rapidly deliver software and services to
end-users. Information technology (IT) organizations, such as Github, Mozilla,
Facebook, Google and Netflix have adopted IaC. A systematic mapping study on
existing IaC research can help researchers to identify potential research areas
related to IaC, for example, the areas of defects and security flaws that may
occur in IaC scripts. Objective: The objective of this paper is to help
researchers identify research areas related to infrastructure as code (IaC) by
conducting a systematic mapping study of IaC-related research. Methodology: We
conduct our research study by searching six scholar databases. We collect a set
of 33,887 publications by using seven search strings. By systematically
applying inclusion and exclusion criteria, we identify 31 publications related
to IaC. We identify topics addressed in these publications by applying
qualitative analysis. Results: We identify four topics studied in IaC-related
publications: (i) framework/tool for infrastructure as code; (ii) use of
infrastructure as code; (iii) empirical study related to infrastructure as
code; and (iv) testing in infrastructure as code. According to our analysis,
52% of the studied 31 publications propose a framework or tool to implement the
practice of IaC or extend the functionality of an existing IaC tool.
Conclusion: As defects and security flaws can have serious consequences for the
deployment and development environments in DevOps, along with other topics, we
observe the need for research studies that will study defects and security
flaws for IaC.Comment: Paper submitted to the journal of Information and Software Technolog