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System Design Masterclass · Cloud Infrastructure
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Before cloud computing, launching a new application meant buying physical servers. You'd estimate capacity (usually wrong), order hardware (4-6 weeks lead time), rack it in a data center (if you had one), install an OS, configure networking, and pray you didn't under-provision. If traffic spiked, tough luck, you couldn't conjure new servers overnight.
IaaS changed this. Instead of buying hardware, you rent it by the hour. Need 10 servers for a load test? Spin them up, run the test, shut them down. Charged for 2 hours of usage instead of $50,000 in hardware. Need to scale from 2 servers to 200 for a Black Friday sale? Click a button. Need servers in Tokyo for Japanese customers? Available in 60 seconds.
IaaS is the foundation of cloud computing. Every other cloud service model. PaaS, SaaS, FaaS, containers, runs on top of IaaS infrastructure. Understanding it means understanding what you're actually renting when you pay AWS, Azure, or GCP.
IaaS gives you virtualized versions of physical infrastructure:
| Resource | Physical World | IaaS Equivalent |
|---|---|---|
| Server | Rack-mounted machine | EC2, Azure VM, GCE |
| Hard drive | SAN, NAS | EBS, Azure Disk, GCE PD |
| Network | Switches, routers, cables | VPC, subnets, load balancers |
| Firewall | Hardware appliance | Security groups, NACLs |
Your responsibility (a lot):
Provider's responsibility:
The key trade-off: Maximum control, maximum responsibility. You can install any OS, any runtime, any software, but you also manage all of it. This is why higher-level services (PaaS, serverless) exist: they trade some control for less operational burden.