Information Technology (IT) Infrastructure is termed as a collection of software, hardware, data centres, networks, facilities and equipment used to test, develop, monitor, operate, support and manage information technology services.
In this digitalized era, business needs and technologies are advancing on a daily basis. In order to keep up the pace and meet business goals, organizations use a more diverse assortment of data centre infrastructure.
Given below are a few types of infrastructure –
Immutable infrastructure:
Immutable infrastructure is an approach where the servers are not modified like mutable infrastructure, instead of when something needs to be modified, fixed or updated in any way, new servers are built to replace the old ones. Moreover, after the new servers are validated, they are put to use and the old ones are decommissioned.
The benefits of using an immutable infrastructure are that it is not only more consistent and reliable but a lot simpler with a predictable deployment process. It eliminates the issues that are frequently experienced in mutable infrastructures. Furthermore, using an immutable infrastructure provides faster server provisioning in a cloud computing environment, comprehensive deployment automation and solutions for handling ephemeral and stateful data.
Mutable infrastructure:
Mutable infrastructure is where the same servers are frequently updated, modified and tuned to meet the ongoing needs of the purpose it serves. This traditional infrastructure extends to every switch and server that is unique. The IT staff handling this type of infrastructure spend countless hours in order to search for the source of any problem they face. Moreover, this is considered to be faster and takes less effort compared to building a new server to serve their needs.They also can upgrade and downgrade packages manually, deploy new code onto the existing servers directly and tweak configuration files on a server-by-server basis.
Composable infrastructure:
The composable infrastructure is a framework where physical compute, network fabric resources and storage are services. Various resources are logically pooled into the servers so that the staff does not have to be physically present every time to configure hardware to support a specific software application.
It enables the staff to logically pool the resources which reduces both over-provisioning and under-utilization to create a more cost-effective and agile data centre. This infrastructure is used by organizations utilizing critical legacy applications that need to remain on-premises.
Dynamic infrastructure:
The dynamic infrastructure is a collection of various data centre resources including, networking, storage and compute that enables it to automatically provision and adjust itself depending on the demands. This infrastructure mostly relies on software to identify, classify, virtualize and track data centre resources. Multiple resources are grouped into pools irrespective of their physical location within one or more data centres. Furthermore, by classifying these resources, IT staff can establish and monitor multiple service tiers in order to meet the increase in demands. Apart from this infrastructure using software to manage resources, the IT staff can also choose to manage it manually.
Critical infrastructure:
The critical infrastructure is a collection of operational assets that are essential to ensure the security of a nation including, its economy and the public’s health and safety. Despite the critical infrastructure being similar in most nations owing to the basic requirements, the infrastructure under this category can vary based on a nation’s needs. The concepts listed under high availability and resilience are essential; including remote data centres and cloud resources to support workload redundancy.
Cloud infrastructure:
The cloud infrastructure is a framework composed of hardware and software components that support the computing requirements of a public or private cloud storage service. It consists of an abstraction layer that virtualizes the available resources and logically presents them to users over the internet with the help of application program interface (API), command lines and graphical interface. Moreover, its additional capabilities include user automated billing, self-service, charge-back, and user-side reporting in order to enable the user to avail and deploy the services.
Dark infrastructure:
Even though the dark infrastructure is important for the continued operation of the documented infrastructure, it consists of an active software or service that is undocumented and whose existence and functionalities are unknown to the user. The user may discover the dark infrastructure on searching for the source of a problem and attempt to correct the issue. Its existence is revealed only when something stops working or when the user inspects how the software is operating. In case it is left undetected, it might cause additional problems while troubleshooting and become serious security or compliance vulnerability for the organization.