Cloud Data Centers - The New Reality

In the last few years, there has been a shift toward cloud systems, which enable the companies to scale in an easy and cheap way depending on the needs. They also enable companies to take advantage of something called Infrastructure as Code (IAC), which basically allows you to treat your physical resources (servers and routers) that previously had to be bought according to the needs as code that you can review, run, and re-run to adapt the infrastructure to your requirements.

In this chapter, we are going to walk through the main cloud providers, taking a look at their main strengths and weak points in order to form a clear picture of what they offer and how we can, as engineers, take advantage of it.

Out of all the providers in the market, we are going to focus on these two:

• Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Google Cloud Platform

We are also going to talk a bit about these:

• Heroku
• Azure
• DigitalOcean

We should have an open minded attitude, as all of them can offer a different and valuable set of features, something that should not be overlooked.

We are going to introduce Kubernetes, which is, in my humble opinion, the answer to many problems in the modern DevOps world.