Infrastructure as Code, 2nd Edition

Chapter 3. Infrastructure Platforms

There is a vast landscape of tools relating in some way to modern cloud infrastructure. The question of which technologies to select and how to fit them together can be overwhelming. This chapter presents a model for thinking about the higher-level concerns of your platform, the capabilities it provides, and the infrastructure resources you may assemble to provide those capabilities.

This is not an authoritative model or architecture. You will find your own way to describe the parts of your system. Agreeing on the right place in the diagram for each tool or technology you use is less important than having the conversation.

The purpose of this model is to create a context for discussing the concepts, practices, and approaches in this book. A particular concern is to make sure these discussions are relevant to you regardless of which technology stack, tools, or platforms you use. So the model defines groupings and terminology that later chapters use to describe how, for instance, to provision servers on a virtualization platform like VMware, or an IaaS cloud like AWS.

The Parts of an Infrastructure System

There are many different parts, and many different types of parts, in a modern cloud infrastructure. I find it helpful to group these parts into three platform layers (Figure 3-1):

Applications

Applications and services provide capabilities to your organization and its users. Everything else in this model exists to enable this layer.

Application ...