Cloud infrastructure setup is the process of designing and building the servers, networking, storage, and access controls a new application or system runs on - from a blank cloud account. Unlike migration, there's no existing workload to move, which means the design decisions made here shape everything the infrastructure will support for years afterward.
How that infrastructure gets built varies widely by approach. Manual console configuration is the fastest way to get something running and the fastest way to end up with undocumented, unrepeatable infrastructure. Infrastructure as Code fixes that by defining every resource in version-controlled files. At the largest scale, organizations running many teams adopt a Landing Zone: a pre-configured, multi-account environment with governance and security baked in from day one.
01
- Multi-AZ by default
- No single point of failure on production workloads.
02
- Least-privilege IAM
- Every role scoped to exactly what it needs, and no more.
03
- Defined in Terraform
- Version-controlled, reviewable, and reproducible.
04
- Recovery tested
- Backups proven before you need them, not during an outage.