From the course: Learning Infrastructure for Developers

On-premise infrastructure vs. IaaS

From the course: Learning Infrastructure for Developers

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On-premise infrastructure vs. IaaS

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- [Narrator] When creating infrastructure to run your application on a remote server, you have two options on-premise infrastructure or infrastructure as a service. With on-premise infrastructure you own and maintain the remote servers your application runs on. You are in charge of keeping the hardware up to date and ensuring your servers stay up and running with your application. With the complicated on-premise infrastructure solution, your company will likely hire an internal support team to manage it. As the name suggests on-premise infrastructure is likely onsite and close to home for the organization to keep a close eye on. However, since the servers are on site, if there is a local network outage, these servers are affected and your application goes down. Many companies started with on-premise infrastructure and are now moving to the Cloud with infrastructure as a service to help lower infrastructure costs and ensure their application is more highly available. Some examples of platforms that offer infrastructure as a service are Amazon Web Services, the Google Cloud Platform and Azure. Instead of building and maintaining your remote servers in house infrastructure as a service allows your computing resources to be elsewhere in the world, your hardware becomes virtualized. Amazon Web Services, or AWS is an example of a Cloud provider that has infrastructure as a service options that will host your infrastructure components, such as servers, storage and network hardware. Instead of you replacing and maintaining the hardware and your on-premise infrastructure, a Cloud provider can manage that now, and you can focus on your application. So, if you don't pay for the hardware, how do you pay for the service? It depends on the Cloud provider. Some Cloud providers charge by time and others by usage. Some use both models and charged by time for certain products and usage for others. Cloud providers also provide access to highly detailed logs, monitoring, security, and backups for replication and recovery. These are all things you would need to build and maintain yourself with on-premise infrastructure. Infrastructure as a service is also much more scalable. If you want to scale with an on-premise solution, you have to buy more hardware and set up more servers. With a Cloud provider you can scale up or down based on how much traffic you are getting easily. Your company is just assigned or unassigned another server. Servers from a Cloud provider are located all throughout the world, so, it's much less likely for all of these servers to have outages at the same time, encouraging high availability. So, why doesn't everyone go to infrastructure as a service on the Cloud? Sometimes it just doesn't fit a company's needs. For example, if a company cares deeply about security, an on-premise solution is the most secure solution a company could get because the company has complete control over the data. However, if the network is configured incorrectly, vulnerabilities are created and there is potential risk. Some companies also may have previously invested in a hefty on-premise solution that they are not ready to replace. There is no right or wrong answer on whether to use on-premise infrastructure or infrastructure as a service it just depends on your company's needs.

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