1. Infra the Beginning

Infrastructure: the word has this weight about it. Bridges, roads, racks, servers…. The word carries this connotation of tangibility – that if something is infrastructure, that there is something substantial, bulky, heavy, and real – not some ephemeral or abstract notion that can be destroyed or recreated at a moment’s notice. IT practitioners these days are thinking of infrastructure in much different terms than they were five years ago. In the mind of the cloud-enlightened IT pro, servers are now abstract units of raw computing power dynamically allocated when needed by a system and disposed of when their task is completed. Users get the resources they want when they need them, forsaking bygone capacity planning exercises that have traditionally led to data centers and server racks overprovisioned for peak loads, only to sit underutilized most of the time. These days, IT infrastructure scaleout is defined by Application Programming Interface (API) calls and the speed of the Internet/cloud provider, no longer by purchase orders and six- to eight-week lead times. While we all realize that this paradigm is the new normal, it's worth taking a moment to reflect on how we got here, evaluating the current landscape, and looking forward to things to come. In many ways, this indeed is a golden era of computing; in this book, we're going to embrace that notion fully by both taking in a broad view of the AWS infrastructure automation landscape and casting a deep lens (pun intended) toward the many different tools and services that comprise this landscape.