Infrastructure as Code, 2nd Edition

Chapter 10. Application Runtimes

I introduced application runtimes in “The Parts of an Infrastructure System”, as part of a model that organizes the parts of a system into three layers. In this model, you combine resources from the infrastructure layer to provide runtime platforms that people can deploy applications onto.

Application runtimes are composed of infrastructure stacks that you define and create using infrastructure management tools, as described in Chapter 5, and depicted in Figure 10-1.

The starting point for designing and implementing application runtime infrastructure is understanding the applications that will use it. What language and execution stacks do they run? Will they be packaged and deployed onto servers, in containers, or as FaaS serverless code? Are they single applications deployed to a single location, or multiple services distributed across a cluster? What are their connectivity and data requirements?

The answers to these questions lead to an understanding of the infrastructure resources that the application runtime layer needs to provision and manage to run the applications. The parts of the application runtime layer map to the parts of the infrastructure platform I describe in “Infrastructure Resources”. These will include an execution environment based around compute resources, data management built on storage resources, and connectivity composed of networking resources.

Figure 10-1. The application layer composed of infrastructure stacks

This ...