Architecting for Scale, 2nd Edition

Chapter 16. 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, Azure Cloud Storage, or Google Cloud Storage)

• Servers (such as Amazon’s EC2, Azure Servers, or Google Compute Engine)

And in fact, you can utilize the cloud efficiently and effectively using only these two types of 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 improve your scalability. Knowing how these components are organized and managed can help determine which capabilities you wish to utilize for your application.

While the concepts discussed here apply to all cloud providers, for this chapter we will focus on AWS for our examples and illustrations.

Structure of Cloud-Based Services

There are three basic types of cloud-based services:

• Raw resource

• Server-based managed resource

• Serverless managed resource

Figure 16-1 illustrates these three types. Raw resources provide basic server virtualization support and nothing else. The application and the operating system that runs the application on the virtualized hardware are all owned and managed by the consumer. Only the virtualization layer is managed by the cloud provider. Server-based managed resources follow the same basic system architecture; they still run software on a virtualized server. The difference is that the ...