Colocation providers

Next, colocation providers came on the scene, with a business model to take away some of the responsibilities and provide services for a fee. They took away the need for companies to purchase real estate and other peripheral assets, like HVAC, by renting out such services for a fee.

They offered a turnkey solution for customers to house their own computational, networking assets for a charge. The customers still had to budget, purchase assets, and forecast their capacity requirements, even while renting out real estate.

Things got slightly better and the organizations grew leaner, but there were still a lot of activities to be done and elements to be created while supporting software development. These included the following:

• Budgeting and purchasing of bare metal computational and networking hardware
• Configuration and provisioning of servers
• Authoring code
• Deployment strategies
• Designing and implementing strategies for  high availability of the applications.
• Backup and restore mechanisms
• Performance and scalability
• Patch management and uptime