From the course: AWS Essential Training for Developers

On-premise infrastructure - Amazon Web Services (AWS) Tutorial

From the course: AWS Essential Training for Developers

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On-premise infrastructure

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- Let's clear the air and demystify the cloud. And to do this, we need to go back in time to the birth of the cloud, to the year 2006, right before Amazon Web Services launched. So at this time, to host an application over to the internet, most medium to large organizations would self-host and build out an expensive data center room in their office. Or they would do what most small businesses were doing and they would rent space in someone else's data center called co-location, which would provide you with redundant sources of power and internet so that, you know, your whole website doesn't go down every time building maintenance shuts off the breakers. If you've never been inside a data center, you've likely seen one of these in the movies. This is the part where the hacker breaks into the super secret facility, plugs their laptop into one of the racks and steals the secret files. And a real data center really kind of looks like that, except that person in the hoodie crouched on the floor with their laptop is someone who actually works for the data center and not a real life hacker. All right, so what we're looking at here is just one of those servers from one of those racks. Now I've taken the lid off the server and now we can see inside it. And if you look at it, you'll see that it's mostly all the same components you would find in your computer at home. These components are just arranged in a different casing so that it slots easily into the rack to save space in the data center. But it's still got a processor, it's got sticks of ram and it's got a hard drive that's 99% identical to the one that's in your computer at home. So let me push this off to the side. Let's take a look at this. This tower computer is sold as a small business server, and it has almost the same components as the flat 1U server in the rack. It just comes in a different form factor. In fact, it's almost identical to a tower computer you'd use as a workstation or your PC at home, except usually these servers don't have these sweet graphics cards because they rarely even have monitors attached to them. We'll use this small business server in this course when referring to servers, although in real life, your cloud servers run off a flat 1U server like the one that we saw earlier. So in 2006, if you needed a server, you would just go online and buy a server, just like you would shop online for a new laptop. And you'd just have this giant thing shipped to you. Then you would self-host it from a room within your office or you'd set it up, the fancy word for this was to provision it, and then take it down to your co-located data center, which was called the colo, and slot it into your server rack. So a third option that you had is that you could lease dedicated servers. So instead of bringing your own server down to the colo you would just rent one of these servers. And if anything happened to say the hardware of the server, instead of you driving down to the data center to fix it the data center text would just walk over and look at your server and fix anything that was wrong with it. These three types of deployments fell under a category called on-premise hosting, which is some form of just do it yourself hosting where you had the full responsibility of figuring out what to do if your single server failed on a busy Tuesday afternoon. So around this time, virtualization started to appear within the server space. Now a virtual server is just a software abstraction that allows a physical server like this to divide up its CPU and its ram and its disk resources, which is called the bare metal, and run different virtual servers on top of the bare metal. And they may even have different operating systems from the physical server's operating system. So this allowed a single physical server to split up its resources and appear to the outside world as three or even 10 separate servers. So you can do this today with your own computer using software from VMware or VirtualBox and it'll let you run an old copy of say, you know, Windows 7 virtually on top of any operating system you've got. Why does virtualization matter? Virtualization let data centers sell even more dedicated servers because now I can get maybe four virtual servers out of one physical server. Let's talk about how Amazon started capitalizing on this technology to fix some of the common problems that people were having with dedicated hardware.

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