The beginning

⚙️ Configuration management and relevant tools

👍 Pros

👎 Cons

Virtual machines

Mutability vs. immutability

☁️ The Cloud hosting

Modern infrastructure

The beginning

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…

We would order servers and wait for months until they arrive. To make our misery worse, even after they come, we’d wait for weeks, sometimes even months, until they are placed in racks and provisioned.

At that time, only a select few people could access these servers. If someone does something that should not be done, we could face an extended downtime. On top of that, nobody knew what was running on those servers.

Manual provisioning and installations were a nightmare because even after putting a lot of effort into documentation, given enough time, the state of the servers would always diverge from the documentation. Sysadmins were the key people without whom no one can handle these servers.