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 team, able to build infrastructures. The process went a little bit like this:

1. Fly to the location where you want to set up your infrastructure. Here, take a tour of different datacenters and their facilities. Observe the floor considerations, power considerations, Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC), fire prevention systems, physical security, and so on.
2. Shop for an internet service provider. Ultimately, you are considering servers and a lot more bandwidth, but the process is the same—you want to acquire internet connectivity for your servers.
3. Once this is done, it's time to buy your hardware. Make the right decisions here, because you will probably spend a big portion of your company's money on selecting and buying servers, switches, routers, firewalls, storage, UPS (for when you have a power outage), KVM, network cables, labeling (which is dear to every system administrator's heart), and a bunch of spare parts, hard drives, raid controllers, memory, power cables, and so on.

4. At this point, once the hardware has been purchased and shipped to the data center location, you can rack everything, wire all the servers, and power everything on. Your network team can kick in and establish connectivity to the new datacenter using various links, configuring the edge routers, switches, top of the 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, upgrade the BIOS (sometimes), configure the hardware raid, and finally, put an OS on the 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 there. As you will see in this book, getting new servers up and running with AWS only takes us a few minutes. In fact, you will soon see how to deploy and run multiple services in a few minutes, and just when you need it, with the pay-what-you-use model.