#system infrastructure

The system infrastructure software market is the backbone of the digital world, encompassing the software tools that keep our businesses and organizations running smoothly. This market includes a wide range of products, from system and network management software to security software, storage software, and system software.

The system infrastructure  market is experiencing significant growth, driven by several factors:

Increasing reliance on digital tools: As businesses become more digitalized, they require robust infrastructure to manage their data, applications, and systems.

Growing security threats: The ever-evolving landscape of cyber threats necessitates constant investment in security software to protect critical data and systems.

Shift towards cloud computing: The widespread adoption of cloud computing has led to a demand for software that can manage and optimize cloud-based resources.

Data governance and compliance: Regulations around data privacy and security are driving the need for software that can help organizations manage and govern their data effectively.

Market Size and Growth Projections

The global system infrastructure software market was valued at a staggering USD 152.5 billion in 2022 and is projected to reach a colossal USD 358.72 billion by 2032, reflecting a healthy compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.93%. This growth indicates the increasing importance of reliable and secure infrastructure in today's digital landscape.

Market Segmentation

The system infrastructure software market is segmented into various categories based on type, application, industry vertical, and geography.

By Type: Network and system management software currently holds the largest market share, but the security software segment is expected to witness significant growth in the coming years.

By Application: System infrastructure software is utilized across various industries, with IT and telecom leading the way.

Key Players and Trends

Major players in the system infrastructure software market include established names like Amazon Web Services, BMC Software, Inc., and Broadcom Inc. The market is also witnessing the emergence of innovative startups offering niche solutions.

Looking ahead, several trends are expected to shape the future of the system infrastructure software market:

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML): These technologies will be integrated into infrastructure software to automate tasks, improve performance, and enhance security.

The growing importance of edge computing: As more devices and data are generated at the network edge, infrastructure software will need to adapt to manage these distributed environments effectively.

Focus on sustainability: With growing concerns about energy consumption, there will be a demand for infrastructure software solutions that are energy-efficient and promote sustainable IT practices.

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Saw two great talks on this topic at Signal this year.

Usable Architecture

A wonderful talk by Joyce Jang and Kate Heddleston about how to make system architecture more usable, in order to promote scalability - not just of software, but of teams. Some gems from this talk:

“If your system is too complex for your whole team to use safely, it is too complex. Period.” - building out systems that don’t have to be barricaded from developers in order to protect themselves just means everyone can contribute more code, and that it’s easier to understand what’s going on.

The question “How do you deploy code?” Their recommendation: a single deploy button. If you build your tests and architecture correctly, then by the time it reaches the deploy stage it should be easily ready to go. It’s better to setup a build system with well-rounded tests and then just have things automatically deployed if they pass tests. This is hard for many companies, because it requires thorough testing.

The question “How do you know where you are in your system?” This is especially an issue in a microservices architecture. It’s something worth paying attention to.

Containers. They sure are all the buzz lately. But the main point they made is that containers are great for usability for two reasons: 1. Changing the system installations requires the same workflow as changing code; 2. System installations are linked to Git commits.

Overall, a really enlightening talk. Really enjoyed their insight into building usable web infrastructure.

Check out the talk.

Common Vulnerabilities

Really enjoyed hearing Eileen Uchitelle from Basecamp talk about common security vulnerabilities and how to avoid them. Always good to have that extra reminder for taking care of CSRF and XSS attacks on your web applications, and it was great learning about XXE attacks, which I hadn’t known much about.

CSRF attacks, for those who don’t know, are Cross-Site Request Forgery attacks. They’re a bit spooky, because they require little to no user action - by hijacking a user’s active session, the attacked can appear almost indistinguishable from the victim. Luckily with modern frameworks, there is often built-in protection using authenticity tokens. Still, it’s important to check that the version and framework you use is actually doing something about this.

XSS, Cross-Site Scripting attacks, can be seriously damaging if you don’t sanitize all user input coming into your site. Best thing you can do is always sanitize user data (a sanitizing library, liked Yahoo’s [xss-filters](https://github.com/yahoo/xss-filters], is a good idea), or just minimize direct user input  strings wherever possible.

XXE attacks are so interesting! XXE stands for XML eXternal Entity (nice job with the abbreviations, guys...). Basically, there is a way to load a file into an XML file in order to create extensible XML. Seems like a great idea? Well, it’s actually terrible! Apparently, if external entities are allowed in your XML, an attacker can request any file on your DB (assuming they can figure out it’s name). So they can steal all your secrets, including important infrastructure information, and can literally hijack your application. Moral of the story: XML, why. Also, don’t allow (if you simply must use XML) external entities ever. Or if you do, make sure to whitelist that biz!

Check out my posts about Signal 2016:

Twilio Signal 2016 (overview)

Twilio Signal 2016 - Hiring in Tech

Things are bound to fail when it comes to large scale deployments in any configuration of the infrastructure, even more so when you are implementing virtual servers “in the cloud” outside their sphere of influence. So, you must be prepared for things to fail. This is a good thing, why? It forces you to think ahead in failure scenarios and to design IT system infrastructure in a way that minimizes single points of failure.

Overall, I have used, implemented, architected and managed multiple global enterprise-grade cloud systems and have  been impressed with the absolute reliability of Amazon’s EC2.  Like many other professionals, I did not know what to expect all the time, but I was pleasantly surprised.  Very rarely does an EC2 instance have an absolute complete fallout.  Matter of fact, I cant not recall when I have ever seen a complete failure.  I have seen a few instances where they have been in a deteriorated state.  Using monitoring systems, I have generally received a heads-up via email or SMS allow myself enough time to mitigate the risk proactively versus reactively.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with expecting things to fail at any time.  I see this as a primary differentiator separating the unexperienced from seasoned leaders.  This mentality requires you to think implement systems more cautiously with full redundancy, scalability, emergency fail-over and most importantly fully-tested backup and recovery solutions.  When architecting and planning, consider the following:

Fully Automate Infrastructure Deployments

Consider for a moment where you might be dealing tens and/or hundreds of virtual server instances that require the ability to scale up and down either onDemand or better yet fully automated.  Server instances are not the only thing affected for this.  You need to consider the additional infrastructure components like load balancers, storage, configurations, application settings, etc.

This can be achieved using custom scripts that will automatically build each and every server instance. Starting with either a custom created image (AMI) or a standard “Vanilla” core image (AMI), these instances can be rolled out which contain enough bootstrap code to instantiate the custom configuration scripts. Using services like RightScale or Scalr help this process tremendously.  Simply by specifying what “role” that instance belongs to (for example ‘web-server’ or ‘master-db-server’ or ‘slave-db-server’) it will run a script that belongs to that specific role.  In this script you can install everything the instance needs to do its job including pre-requisite packages along with the actual application with all its necessary configuration files.

Fully automating your deployments truly enables you to scale as defined or infinitely.  Considering the option to fully automate your system environment/architecture, application infrastructure requirements need to be designed in such a way that allows this type of scaling.  Regardless, having the necessary building blocks for automatic deployment any type of server that you need is invaluable.

When scaling, it is highly recommended that you keep information about your deployed instances in a database. This enables the ability to write tools that can inspect the database and generate the necessary configuration files (such as role configuration file), and other text files such as DNS zone files. This database becomes the one true source of information about the infrastructure.

Speaking of DNS, specifically in the context of Amazon EC2, it’s worth rolling out your own internal DNS servers, with zones that aren’t even registered publicly, but for which your internal DNS servers are authoritative. Then all communication within the EC2 cloud can happen via internal DNS names, as opposed to IP addresses. Trust me, your tired brain will thank you. This would be very hard to achieve though if you were to manually edit BIND zone files. One approach is to automatically generate those files from the master database mentioned above.

While on the subject of fully automated deployments, one goal that should be highly considered is to remove the requirement to ssh into any production server.  When deploy the server through automated scripts, the application gets installed automatically and monitoring agents get set up automatically, so there should really be no need to manually do stuff on the server itself.  If you want to make a change, you can create an additional script that can be pushed to production. If the server misbehaves or gets out of line with the other servers, you simply terminate that server instance and launch another one. Since you have everything automated, it’s one command line for terminating the instance, and another one for deploying a brand new replacement. Simplicity at it’s finest!

Design Your Infrastructure With Automated Horizontal Scaling

Generally speaking, there are two ways to scale an infrastructure: vertically; better known as deploying your application on more powerful servers, and horizontally; increasing the number of servers that support your application.  For ‘infinite’ scaling in a cloud computing environment, you need to design your system infrastructure so that it scales horizontally.  Otherwise you’re bound to hit limits of individual servers that you will find very hard to get past.  Horizontal scaling also eliminates single points of failure and increases the accessibility and redundancy of the infrastructure.

A few ideas to consider when deploying a Web site with a database back-end so that it uses multiple tiers, with each tier being able to scale horizontally:

Deploy multiple Web servers behind one or more load balancers. This is pretty standard these days, and this tier is the easiest to scale. However, you also want to maximize the work done by each Web server, so you need to find the sweet spot of that particular type of server in terms of httpd processes it can handle. Too few processes and you’re wasting CPU/RAM on the server, too many and you’re overloading the server. You also need to be fully aware of the fact that each EC2 instance costs you money. It can become so easy to launch a new instance that you don’t necessarily think of getting the most out of the existing instances. Avoid the mistake of mis-managing or failing to monitor your resources unless you want to have a possible sticker shock when you get the bill from Amazon at the end of the month.

Implement Load Balancing. Amazon now offers load balancers for a very reasonable rate.  The notion of Elastic Load Balancing, as recently brought to public attention by Amazon’s offering of the capability, is nothing new. The basic concept is pure Infrastructure 2.0 and the functionality offered via the API has long been available on several application delivery controllers for many years.  Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances. It enables you to achieve even greater fault tolerance in your applications, seamlessly providing the amount of load balancing capacity needed in response to incoming application traffic. Elastic Load Balancing detects unhealthy instances within a pool and automatically reroutes traffic to healthy instances until the unhealthy instances have been restored. Customers can enable Elastic Load Balancing within a single Availability Zone or across multiple zones for even more consistent application performance.

Deploy several database servers. If you’re using MySQL for example, you can set up a master DB server for writes, and multiple slave DB servers for reads. The slave DBs can sit behind a load balancer. In this scenario, you’re limited by the capacity of the single master DB server. One thing you can do is to use sharding techniques, meaning you can partition the database into multiple instances that each handle writes for a subset of your application domain. Another thing you can do is to write to local databases deployed on the Web servers, either in memory or on disk, and then periodically write to the master DB server (of course, this assumes that you don’t need that data right away; this technique is useful when you have to generate statistics or reports periodically for example).

Another way of dealing with databases is to not use them, or at least to avoid the overhead of making a database call each time you need something from the database. A common technique for this is to use memcache. Your application needs to be aware of memcache, but this is easy to implement in all of the popular programming languages.  Once implemented, you can have your Web servers first check a value in memcache, and only if it’s not there have them hit the database. The more memory you give to the memcached process, the better off you are.

Clearly Define and Establish Measurable Goals