ENGINEERING
Building Early Infrastructure
Cloud Infrastructure
Cloud infrastructure provides the foundation for hosting, scaling, and managing your software product. Early decisions about cloud providers and architecture significantly impact performance, cost, and scalability.
Why it's Important
Ensures a reliable and scalable environment for your application.
Reduces operational overhead with managed services.
Allows flexibility to scale resources based on user demand.
How to Implement
Choose a cloud provider (AWS, Azure, GCP) based on cost, scalability, and features.
Select key services such as compute (EC2, App Engine), storage (S3, Blob Storage), and databases (RDS, Firestore).
Implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform or AWS CloudFormation for repeatability.
Create staging and production environments for development and live deployments.
Monitor usage to optimize cost and performance.
Available Workshops
Cloud Provider Selection Session: Compare providers based on pricing, features, and team expertise.
IaC Hands-On Workshop: Practice creating and deploying infrastructure using Terraform or CloudFormation.
Performance Benchmarking: Test various infrastructure setups for speed and reliability.
High Availability Planning Session: Design a fault-tolerant architecture to minimize downtime.
Cost Optimization Exercise: Identify ways to reduce costs through resource allocation and reserved instances.
Deliverables
Configured cloud environments for development, staging, and production.
Automated infrastructure deployment scripts.
Basic documentation on infrastructure architecture.
How to Measure
Uptime percentage and reliability metrics.
Cost efficiency relative to traffic and resource usage.
Feedback from developers on ease of deployment and access.
Real-World Examples
Netflix
Built a highly scalable infrastructure using AWS.
Dropbox
Transitioned to their private cloud for cost optimization and control.
Slack
Utilized AWS to quickly scale during rapid growth phases
Get It Right
Start small and scale infrastructure incrementally.
Automate as much as possible using IaC tools.
Regularly monitor and optimize costs.
Build redundancies to prevent outages.
Document architecture and configurations for clarity.
Don't Make These Mistakes
Choosing a provider without evaluating long-term costs.
Overprovisioning resources, leading to wasted spend.
Failing to secure cloud environments, leaving vulnerabilities.
Skipping staging environments, risking bugs in production.
Neglecting monitoring tools to track performance and usage.
Provided courtesy of Tricia Ballad, Tech Leader
Disentangled Tech