Infrastructure Flashcards
What is a server?
Think of it as the hardware of a computer.
How are physical servers connected to each other?
Hardware, such as switches, wires, routers
What pains are common with maintaining physical servers?
Costs of maintaining the hardware, costly to scale
What benefits are there to maintaining physical servers?
Runs faster, secure info is kept in-house
What do people care about when it comes to maintaining their physical servers?
Is the hardware working? Is it overheating? Think of what can happen to your computer when you try to do too much at once
Why virtualize your servers using a hypervisor?
To optimize the capacity of your servers. Do more with the space you have.
When virtualizing your servers, what does a hypervisor allow you to do?
Divide up the server’s capacity, to create multiple Virtual Machines (VMs) on each server.
Other than optimizing the capacity your servers, what else does using VMs allow you to do?
Work on separate applications, independently, within the same server. If one crashes, it doesn’t take affect the other applications.
What does Docker allow you to do?
Create containers
Why use containers over virtual machines
Containers are 10-100x more efficient than VMs
What is the cloud?
Computer hardware that is managed off-site, that you access via the internet. Think of it like having your computer screen and hardware in separate places
What benefits are there to using a cloud provider vs maintaining physical servers?
Cloud providers like AWS remove the costs of maintaining the hardware, make it easier to scale and adopt new technologies
What drawbacks are there to using a cloud provider vs maintaining physical servers?
Being dependent on a service to maintain your infrastructure, storing sensitive data off-site, costs
Why might a company choose to take a hybrid infrastructure approach? Partial cloud, partial on-prem.
Might decide that some pieces of the infrastructure need to be highly ephemeral and scalable, which is better managed by a cloud provider. While also wanting to keep tabs on certain sensitive data or applications in-house.
What challenges stem from moving from maintaining on-premise servers to cloud infrastructure?
On-premise servers and cloud servers are treated as separate environments and most tools are typically built to monitor one or the other, but not seamlessly together. Cloud platforms provide tools that only monitor their environment.
