How many days have you wasted setting up development machines or VMs? How many times have you faithfully followed a multi-page setup guide only to find you missed a step and have to start again?
Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply run a script and let your development machine build itself while you do something more interesting instead?
“Infrastructure as Code” may be the solution to this problem, and also to the much bigger and more expensive problem of how to build complete dev, test and production environments quickly and consistently (think about the hassle involved in building a test environment with four web servers, four app servers and a database cluster along with attendant network configuration).