When deciding to launch a business online, besides having a solid business case or business idea, one of the key components to a solution is choosing a infrastructure provider.
What is a infrastructure provider?
As the term might infer, an infrastructure provider is a company that provides infrastructure for you to host your solution – being a back-end API, website, database, etc. The infrastructure in this case is hardware such as routers, firewalls, machines capable of computing, etc.
What are the options when it comes to infrastructure providers?
Many. It also depends on the requirement. Small to Medium companies (SME’s) might opt for purchasing and operating there own machine within their own premises also providing the networking expertise in-house. This should be fine for a low traffic solution and in the case of a failure restoring from some form of a back-up should be fine. Alternative to hosting the machine on premise would be to purchase space in a more fit for purpose environment such as a data center.
Data centers are typically where large, enterprise and hyper scale organizations tend to host and operate there hardware from. Typically space would be allocated for the different organizations either on it’s own or colocated alongside other organizations. Security clearance and access to the hardware becomes important here due to the machines being hosted by a 3rd party. Data center accreditation becomes key as well to organizations that host data with sensitive information such as personal information. The organizations here either outsource there hardware to a data center provider or operate and run their own data centers.
..and then there was cloud providers.
Typically moving from on-premise (office based) to a data center provider or hosting your own data center is costly. Large, enterprise, hyper scale organizations typically have computing power that either goes to waste i.e. not in use, hardware that requires maintenance and a whole host of other items that typically comes with running a data center full of machines. Cloud’s main aim is to help organizations drive down operating costs and allow it to be more manageable from a skills and finance perspective. A cloud provider is able to provide you with infrastructure at the click of a button.
But this can come at a high cost – careful planning and understanding of your requirements is key to understanding how cloud providers can offer you the best value for money when hosting a solution.
Providers
Infrastructure is available globally – the only barrier would be how much are you prepared to pay. Focusing on what we have here in South Africa, these are typically where you would look to host a solution:
Internet service providers, such as RSAWeb, Afrihost and Axxess as examples offer solutions where you can purchase machines, virtual machines or make use of their software as a service offerings. These machines are typically hosted within their own data centers or co-located.
Hyper scale platform providers, such as Azure, AWS, GCP, Alibaba and Huawei offer full on cloud solutions. The data centers of these providers are located globally (as well as locally).
I do not endorse any infrastructure provider within the working environment there is just to many options to choose from. However when I do get around to building my own solutions I typically use Azure.
At the end of it all your architecture for your solution depends on what your requirements are and that will lead you to what infrastructure provider you choose.