Infrastructure provisioning overview

Every time we power on a PC or phone, we see it automatically initiate certain applications or processes before it’s available for use. Over time, as new versions of OSs or apps become available, they can be updated by restarting the app or device. If we need to install a new app, we need to follow the process of acquiring, configuring, and installing it.

An IT department in an enterprise needs to follow a similar process to provision the requested resources, except that the numbers of requested resources are in the hundreds or thousands. Before any application can be deployed, the underlying infrastructure needs to be provisioned with pre-requisite components such as the compute, memory, OS, and runtime environment with required libraries. Operations teams are responsible for getting the infrastructure ready for deployment and maintaining it during its life cycle. They also need to configure a technology stack consisting of VMs, containers...