Network infrastructure refers to the hardware and software resources of an entire network that enable network connectivity, communication, operations and management of an enterprise network. It provides the communication path and services between users, processes, applications, services and external networks/the internet.
Robust network infrastructure is the prerequisite for all distributed systems. Throughput, latency, and reliability directly dictate application performance. Modern infrastructure moves beyond cabling and switches to Software-Defined Networking (SDN), allowing network logic to be programmed rather than physically cabled.
The network is no longer just plumbing; it is code. We define our network infrastructure declaratively (VPCs, Subnets, Firewalls via Terraform). We operate under the assumption that the network is unreliable (Fallacy #1 of Distributed Computing) and design our applications to be resilient to partition and latency.