Infrastructure as Code (IaC) platforms declaratively define and provision cloud and on-premises infrastructure resources — virtual machines, networks, managed services, Kubernetes clusters, databases, DNS, IAM policies — from version-controlled code. Core capabilities include declarative resource definition in a DSL or general-purpose language, state management (which resources exist, in what configuration), plan-and-apply workflows that preview changes before executing, module/component reuse, policy-as-code integration for pre-apply validation, and drift detection between defined and actual state. The category is dominated by Terraform (and its fork OpenTofu), with Pulumi offering general-purpose-language alternatives and cloud-vendor options (CloudFormation, Azure Bicep, Google Deployment Manager) serving single-cloud deployments.