# Infrastructure
Infrastructure can be thought of as the plumbing of our systems. It’s how everything connects and works.
All hardware is infrastructure. This includes laptops, servers, routers, cables. But not all infrastructure is hardware. In today's technical landscape, infrastructure also encompasses virtual hardware (the virtualisation of computer systems) and you can even deploy an entire infrastructure made of servers and routers by writing a few lines of code (also referred to as [Infrastructure as Code](/capabilities/development/infrastructure-and-deployment.md#automating-infrastructure)).
Our infrastructure teams used to manage servers in our datacentres. Today, our physical servers are hosted by public cloud providers like AWS (Amazon Web Services) and Microsoft Azure. These companies handle the physical hardware, on top of which they’ve built a wide range of infrastructure services (like firewalls, load balancers or virtual servers) that we can easily consume. This allows our [DevOps](/team/nec-digital-studio-team.md#devops-engineer) teams to focus on developing feature-rich, performant and reilient solutions on virtual infrastructure hosted in the public cloud.
Designing infrastructure now focuses on specifying the architecture through software configuration, rather than manually connecting network cables and installing operating systems. We plan aspects like the:
* Overall architecture
* Required public and private connectivity
* Resilience enabling high availability
* Data flows (linked to [Data architecture](/capabilities/technology/data-architecture.md))
* Number and type of containers (self-contained units of software with all necessary components) and virtual machines
* Firewalls and other security protections
* Load balancers and scalaing mechanisms.
Our DevOps team creates all configurations to provision and deploy this infrastructure to the cloud. We evaluate all cloud hosting options to ensure we choose the best solution for our clients.
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