What is Infrastructure?

What is Infrastructure?

Infrastructure is everything required to run an application. Without it, an app cannot be deployed or reached by users.

Examples

• Servers (EC2)
• Storage (S3)
• Databases (RDS)
• Networking (VPC)
• Load balancers
• Security groups
• DNS

Real-world example

For an e-commerce application:

Frontend Server
Backend Server
Database Server
Load Balancer
Storage
Network

All of these components together form the infrastructure.

Traditional Infrastructure Management

Before cloud automation tools, infrastructure was created by hand in the console.

To launch an EC2 instance you would:

Login to AWS Console
        ↓
Open EC2 Dashboard
        ↓
Launch Instance
        ↓
Select AMI
        ↓
Select Instance Type
        ↓
Configure Security Group
        ↓
Create Key Pair
        ↓
Launch Instance

Every server had to be created the same way — manually.

Problems with Manual Infrastructure

Time consuming

Clicking through consoles for every environment wastes hours.

Human errors

Wrong security group, port, region, or instance type is easy to miss and hard to spot later.

Difficult to repeat

Recreating the same setup for staging, production, or a new region is slow and inconsistent.

No version control

You cannot easily see what changed, when, or who changed it.

Hard to scale

Creating 10, 20, or 50 servers by hand is not practical.