Deployability-Centric Infrastructure-as-Code Generation: An LLM-based Iterative Framework

Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) generation holds significant promise for automating cloud infrastructure provisioning. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) present a promising opportunity to democratize IaC development by generating deployable infrastructure templates from natural language descriptions, but current evaluation focuses on syntactic correctness while ignoring deployability, the fatal measure of IaC template utility. We address this gap through two contributions: (1) IaCGen, an LLM-based deployability-centric framework that uses iterative feedback mechanism to generate IaC templates, and (2) DPIaC-Eval, a deployability-centric IaC template benchmark consists of 153 real-world scenarios that can evaluate syntax, deployment, user intent, and security. Our evaluation reveals that state-of-the-art LLMs initially performed poorly, with Claude-3.5 and Claude-3.7 achieving only 30.2% and 26.8% deployment success on the first attempt respectively. However, IaCGen transforms this performance dramatically: all evaluated models reach over 90% passItr@25, with Claude-3.5 and Claude-3.7 achieving 98% success rate. Despite these improvements, critical challenges remain in user intent alignment (25.2% accuracy) and security compliance (8.4% pass rate), highlighting areas requiring continued research. Our work provides the first comprehensive assessment of deployability-centric IaC template generation and establishes a foundation for future research.