Summary

In our case study about Acme Inc., we touched on many of the key elements driving the change we are seeing in technology from a data center perspective. The variables that are constantly in tension with building and managing technology infrastructure fundamentally are cost versus performance and distributed versus centralized. Many of the changes that Acme Inc. implemented, whether it was going from closet server rooms to mainframes to virtualization to containers, were meant to overcome challenges around finance and customer experiences. When designing cloud systems, we are constantly trading off how we can deliver an excellent experience while trying to minimize cost. We’ll see this as a common theme as we explore different use cases and prepare for the exam questions; often, you’ll have to think through what would be the best system for the job given specific technical, business, and financial restraints.

Now that we have a general sense of why organizations around the world and across industries are transforming themselves, it’s time to cover foundational cloud concepts. The focus for Chapter 2 will be on understanding why and how the cloud is adopted across different scenarios and business cases. We’ll explore the benefits of cloud infrastructure, along with how networking is the foundation upon which the cloud is built.