Deploying your own hardware versus in the cloud

It wasn't long ago that tech companies, small and large, had to have a proper technical operations organization able to build out infrastructures.

The process went a little bit like this:

1. Fly to the location you want to set up your infrastructure in to take a tour of different data centers and their facilities. Look at the floor considerations, power considerations, heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning (HVAC), fire prevention systems, physical security, and so on.
2. Shop for an internet provider; ultimately, you are talking about servers and a lot more bandwidth, but the process is the same: you want to get internet connectivity for your servers.

1. Once this is done, it's time to buy your hardware. Make the right decisions because you will probably spend a big portion of your company's money on buying servers, switches, routers, firewalls, storage, an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) for when you have a power outage, a kernel-based virtual machine (KVM), network cables, the labeler that is dear to every system administrator's heart, and a bunch of spare parts, hard drives, RAID controllers, memory, power cables, and much more.
2. At this point, once the hardware is bought and shipped to the data center location, you can rack everything, wire all the servers, and power everything. Your network team can kick in and establish connectivity to the new data center using various links, configuring the edge routers, switches, top-of-rack switches, KVM, and firewalls (sometimes). Your storage team is next and will provide the much-needed network-attached storage (NAS) or storage area network (SAN); next, comes your sysops team, which will image the servers, sometimes upgrade the BIOS, configure hardware RAID, and finally put an OS on these servers.

Not only is this a full-time job for a big team, but it also takes a lot of time and money to even get the team and infrastructure in place.

As you will see in this book, getting new servers up and running with AWS will take us minutes. In fact, more than just providing a server within minutes, you will soon see how to deploy and run a service in minutes and just when you need it.