<P> IaC grew as a response to the difficulty posed from two pieces of technology--utility computing and second - generation web frameworks . This brought about widespread scaling problems for many enterprises that were previously only witnessed by huge companies . In 2006 specifically the launch of Amazon Web Services' Elastic Compute Cloud and the 1.0 version of Ruby on Rails just months before . With new tools emerging to handle this ever growing field, the idea of IaC was born . The thought of modelling infrastructure with code, and then having the ability to design, implement, and deploy applications infrastructure with known software best practices appealed to software developers and IT infrastructure administrators . The ability to treat it like code and use the same tools as any other software project would allow developers to rapidly deploy applications . </P> <P> In February 2011 Amazon announced AWS CloudFormation which provides a declarative template - based IaC model for configuring AWS . </P> <P> The value of IaC can be broken down into three, measurable categories: Cost (reduction), speed (faster execution) and risk (remove errors and security violations). Cost reduction aims at helping not only the enterprise financially, but also in terms of people and effort, meaning that by removing the manual component, people are able to refocus their efforts towards other enterprise tasks . Infrastructure automation enables speed through faster execution when configuring your infrastructure and aims at providing visibility to help other teams across the enterprise work quickly and more efficiently . Automation removes the risk associated with human error, like manual misconfiguration; removing this can decrease downtime and increase reliability . These outcomes and attributes help the enterprise move towards implementing a culture of DevOps, the combined working of development and operations . </P> <P> There are generally three approaches to IaC: declarative (functional) vs. imperative (procedural) vs. intelligent (environment aware). The difference between the declarative, the imperative and the intelligent approach is essentially' what' versus' how' versus' why' . The declarative approach focuses on what the eventual target configuration should be; the imperative focuses on how the infrastructure is to be changed to meet this; the intelligent approach focuses on why the configuration should be a certain way in consideration of all the co-relationships and co-dependencies of multiple applications running on the same infrastructure typically found in production . The declarative approach defines the desired state and the system executes what needs to happen to achieve that desired state . Imperative defines specific commands that need to be executed in the appropriate order to end with the desired conclusion . The intelligent determines the correct desired state before the system executes what needs to happen to achieve a desired state that does not impact co-dependent applications . Environment aware desired state is the next generation of IaC . </P>

Which of the following is a configuration definition file in iac