Virtualization and IaaS

The colocation model worked well until the early 2000s. Organizations had to deal with managing a bare metal infrastructure, including things like server racks and network switches. Due to the sporadic nature of the internet traffic, most of the assets and bandwidth were not utilized in an optimum fashion.

While all of this was considered business as usual, innovation gifted the world with platform virtualization. This enabled the bare metal racks to host more than one server instance in a shared hardware fashion, without compromising security and performance. This was a primary step toward the inception of cloud computing, spawning the pay-as-you-use paradigm, which was very attractive to organizations looking to bump up their bottom-lines.

Amazon launched Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which rented out virtualized computational hardware in the cloud, with bare minimum OS configurations and the flexibility to consume as many hardware and network resources as required. This took away the need for organizations to perform approximated capacity planning, and made sure that the infrastructure costs were a function of traction that a business was breaking. This paradigm is called Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). It was widely adopted, and at a fast pace. The reduction in operational costs was the biggest driver behind its adoption.

At the same time, there were some activities that the company still had to undertake, as follows:

• Authoring code
• Configuration and provisioning of servers
• Deployment strategies
• Design of high availability
• Backup and restore mechanisms
• Performance and scalability
• Patch management and uptime