Conceptually, infrastructure is just "application" code that's grown into a highly cohesive, lowly coupled standalone application. If you need a distributed ha

Conceptually, infrastructure is just "application" code that's grown into a highly cohesive, lowly coupled standalone application. If you need a distributed hashmap or distributed lock, (or really any distributed dedicated purpose code), something premade is a good option, especially if that's not your company's specialty. These articles are always a bit interesting that they seem to ignore the debate is "3rd party/outsource" vs "insource". EC2, S3, etc are all just internal "Amazon applications" to support horizontal scaling that Amazon realized there was a huge market for. Somewhere there is code for these someone is writing, maintaining, and operating just like any other "business app". It's especially apparent at large companies for shared services like email, authentication, storage, compute. To the end user, anything across the internet is "infrastructure" for whatever app they're using