There are lots of types of IT infrastructure services out there. We'll start by giving you a high level overview of them in this lesson, then we'll dive into the nitty gritty details on how you configure and maintain these services and later lessons. Sounds good? Let's get started. We talked about physical infrastructure components of an IT environment in an earlier lesson. Remember that you can set up different servers to run your services on, like a server to run your file storage service. You can buy or rent hardware for these servers and set up and store them either on-site, or at another location. Essentially, you manage these servers end-to-end. There's another option. If you don't want to be responsible for managing the hardware tasks and updating your server operating systems security patches and updates, you can use the Cloud alternative to maintain your own infrastructure, which is called Infrastructure as a Service, or IaaS. IaaS providers give you pre-configured virtual machines that you can use just as if you had a physical server. Some popular IaaS providers are, Amazon Web Services and their Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2 instances, Linode, which runs out virtual servers, Windows Azure, and Google Compute Engine, which you've been using throughout this course. You can read more about the different IaaS providers in the supplemental reading right after this video. Your company's internal network, isn't going to be like your network at home. You're going to have multiple computers that need to be on a certain subnet. You have to assign them IP addresses statically or using DHCP. The networking hardware has to be set up, wireless internet will probably need to be available, DNS needs to be working et cetera. If your company is large, networking is usually taken care of by a dedicated team. But in smaller companies, you'll probably be responsible for setting up the network. Network can be integrated in an IaaS provider, but in recent years, it's also been branched off into its own Cloud service, Networking as a Service or NaaS. NaaS allows companies to offshore their networking services so that they don't have to deal with the expensive networking hardware. Companies also won't have to set up their own network security, manage their own routing, set up a WAN and private internets, and so on. For more about NaaS providers, check out the supplemental reading. Let's talk about the software that your company might want to use. Do you need to type out word documents, use an email client, communicate with other people, use operating systems, process spreadsheets or have any of other software needed to run a business? I bet yes. The right software has to be available to your company's users. We've already discussed how to install and maintain software in machines. You have to deal with things like licences, security, updates, and maintenance for each machine. The Cloud alternative to maintaining your own software is known as Software as a Service, or SaaS. Instead of installing a word processor on every machine, you can use Microsoft Office 365 or Google G suite. These are both services that you can purchase that allow you to edit word documents, process spreadsheets, make presentations and more, all from a web browser. You can check out the next supplemental reading for more about SaaS providers. Some companies have a product built around a software application. In this case, there is some things that software developers need to be able to code, build and shape their software. First, specific applications have to be installed for their programming development environment. Then, depending on the product, they might need a database to store information. Finally, if they're serving web content like a website, they'll need to publish their product on the internet. If you're building this entire pipeline yourself, you may need to set up a database and a web server. The programming development environment will also have to be installed on every machine that needs it. If you want an all-in-one solution to building and deploying a web application, you can use something called Platform as a Service, or PaaS. This includes an entire platform that allows you to build code, store information in a database, and serve your application from a single platform. Popular options for PaaS are, Heroku, Windows Azure, and Google App Engine. As you might have guessed, you can read more about PaaS providers in the supplemental reading. The last IT infrastructure service we'll discuss is the management of users, access and authorization. A directory service, centralizes your organizations users and computers in one location so that you can add, update, and remove users and computers. Some popular directory services that you can set up are Windows Active Directory, OpenLDAP, and we'll dive a little deeper into both of these later on in this course. Directory services can also be deployed in the Cloud using Directory as a Service, or DaaS providers. Guess we can read more about DaaS providers. That's right, in the supplemental reading. There you have it. This is a general overview of the most common IT infrastructure services you'll encounter when handling system administration tasks. While Cloud Services are a great option, it's super important that you understand how a service works and how to maintain before you employ the help of a Cloud Service. Even though Cloud Service are widely used in the industry, and have a lot of pros, there are also some cons. These include recurring cost, and the need to depend on the providers service. We're going to teach you about the technical details and the implementation of these common IT infrastructure services. We'll cover everything from setting up your own server, and figuring out which applications you need to be productive, to how to set up multiple users and get your network services in order. By the end of this course, you'll have the foundational knowledge required to set up the IT infrastructure, for a small organization.
