Infrastructure

Infrastructure

General

Infrastructure or at the time of writing this document "operations" is the work that is related to managing a deployed system.

This is the area where application monitoring, network configuration and application deployment among other things are managed.

This area is very big and large companies usually hire staff that focus only on operations but it is not uncommon to find that a basic understanding of operations related work is needed for developers.

DevOps

DevOps is at the time of writing a company culture where the fundamental idea is that the development team responsible for feature delivery is also in charge of maintaining the running system.

You can read more about DevOps here.

Containers

At the time of writing this document container-based application deployment is one of the most common strategies for deploying an application.

Below you will find the most common tools for this deployment strategy.

• Docker
• Docker compose
• Kubernetes

Cloud providers

At the time of writing this document using cloud providers to host your application is a common strategy for making applications of varying sizes available without the need to maintain your own hardware.

Below are the most common cloud-providers for large scale systems.

• Amazon web service (AWS)
• Google cloud platform (GCP)
• Microsoft Azure

Environment provisioning

At the time of writing this document, it is common that companies use a deployment framework that contains a suite of tools that allow for provisioning virtual machine instances in their system.

It is worth to note that at the time of writing this document company favour either container-based solutions or one of the following frameworks but it is less common than both solutions have an equal focus in the same company.

• Chef
• Puppet
• Ansible
• Salt

Useful tools

Below are at the time of writing this document a few common tools for infrastructure-related work.

• Terraform