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Infrastructure as a Service

Summary

Objectives

By the end of this session you should be able to:

  • Explain what Infrastructure as a Service is, and how it compares with traditional data centres.
  • Give an overview of other cloud infrastructure.

Key Points

  • Infrastructure as a Service is on-demand access to computing resources.
  • This provides a seemingly infinite, instant alternative to slow traditional data centre provisioning.
  • Modern cloud providers offer many products with that same on-demand, infinite, instant provisioning experience.

Breakdown

The Spike

Traditional data centres were made up of large warehouses of computers owned by a single company. These data centres would need careful planning, large internet connections and redundant power - as well as the engineering talent to keep it up and running.

Smaller companies wouldn’t be able to afford this. Instead, they would either co-locate their own computers in other people’s data centres or they would rent the computers directly. These computers usually came with long contracts and would take weeks - even months - to provision.

Neither of these classes of organisation could respond to one major problem - a spike in demand. This led to common problems with suddenly popular services, and was known variously as "the Slashdot effect" (Slashdot was a popular news site) or the "Reddit Hug of Death". Computers simply couldn't be brought online quickly enough.

Amazon's Cloud

Amazon had grown into a large organisation, but were frustrated at the speed of their software engineering and platform deployment. To improve this, they had gone through a process of providing strict APIs between their teams. This allowed for their teams to leverage each other’s code directly, instead of relying on human interaction. APIs could respond much faster - and e.g. a new computer could be requested in minutes.

Amazon quickly realised they could offer this as a service to other companies, and it became a very popular option for quickly increasing capacity in face of demand. The Cloud has developed a lot since these early days, but the Cloud is still considered to have these essential qualities: infinite, instant and on-demand.