Architecting for Scale

Chapter 22. Managed Infrastructure

When you think of the cloud, what do you think of? If you are like most people, you think of the following:

• File storage (such as Amazon S3)

• Servers (such as Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2)

And, in fact, you can utilize the cloud efficiently and effectively using only these two resources.

However, cloud companies offer a wide variety of managed services that you can take advantage of to ease your management load, increase your availability, and even improve your scalability.

Knowing how these components are organized and managed can help in determining which capabilities you wish to utilize for your application.

Structure of Cloud-Based Services

There are three basic types of cloud-based services:

• Raw resource

• Managed resource (server-based)

• Managed resource (non-server-based)

Figure 22-1 illustrates these three types.

Figure 22-1. Types of cloud-based services

Raw Resource

A raw cloud resource provides basic capabilities to the user and provides only basic management.

An example of a raw cloud resource is Amazon EC2, which provides raw server capabilities in a managed manner.

The cloud provides management of the basic server virtualization layer, and the creation of the instance and its initial filesystem. However, after the instance is up and running, the operation of the server itself is opaque to the cloud provider. ...