Leveraging Immutable Infrastructure in the Cloud

Among many other benefits of AWS, one that stands out is the ease of provisioning resources in the cloud, dynamically scaling them, and bringing them down again when they’re no longer required. This is a big mental shift from how IT resources were perceived and managed on-premises. Software applications have also evolved during this time and the infrastructure advancements have complemented this unprecedented growth.

If you’ve been in IT for more than a decade, you would agree that every situation around the lack of resources back then was addressed by vertically scaling up the existing servers. Adding more memory, storage, or compute solved most of the problems. Servers would be idle for months and years and get in-place upgrades when applications needed to do more. To make the software applications resilient to hardware failures, companies started looking at other options, such as horizontal scaling, also known as...