Clicking to create one server in the console is easy. But creating tens of resources — VPC, subnets, security groups, EC2, RDS, ALB, Lambda — clicking through all of them, replicating them identically to staging and production, then six months later trying to trace "why is this security group wide open?" — that's where hell begins. Hand-crafted infrastructure can't be reproduced, has no change history, and depends only on human memory. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) attacks this problem head-on — declaring infrastructure in text files enables version control (git), code review, and recreating identical environments with a single command. AWS CloudFormation is AWS's implementation of IaC.