We have looked at various strategies for scaling our application, different types of databases, how to structure our code, and finally how to use the mediator pattern to make the transition from monolith to microservices. However, we haven't discussed where we would be deploying said web application and databases. Let's take a brief look at the deployment landscape.
Till the early 2000s, most servers were deployed on hardware owned by the companies writing the software. There would be dedicated infrastructure and a team to deal with this critical part of software engineering. This was mostly the subject of data centers.
However, in the 2000s, companies began to realize that data centers could be abstracted away because most of the developers weren't interested in handling these problems. This allowed for cheaper and faster development and deployment...