Infrastructure Considerations
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def
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the set of tradeoffs weighed when designing infrastructure — availability, resilience, cost, responsiveness, scalability, ease of deployment, risk transference, ease of recovery, patch availability, power, and compute
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key considerations
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availability — system uptime, balanced against security (available, but only to the right people)
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Resilience — can you maintain availability and recover when something breaks?
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cost — installation, ongoing maintenance, replacement/repair, and tax implications
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responsiveness — how quickly a system responds to a request; especially important for interactive applications
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scalability — how quickly and easily capacity can increase or decrease (elasticity)
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ease of deployment — how many moving parts are involved (web server, database, caching, firewall, etc.)
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Risk Transference — e.g., cybersecurity insurance
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ease of recovery — how quickly a system can be restored after something goes wrong
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patch availability — some vendors patch regularly (e.g., monthly), others rarely
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inability to patch — some embedded systems (HVAC controls, time clocks) were never designed for end-user updates, and may need additional compensating controls like a dedicated firewall
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power — primary power, backup UPS, and generators
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compute — how much processing capability is available, and across how many processors/clouds
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related