Cloud infrastructure providers, such as AWS and Microsoft Azure, offer services for things such as message queues, big data storage, and machine learning processing. The services handle the underlying resource needs such as server, storage provisioning, and also network requirements. You do not have to worry about how this happens under the hood, and it scales as big as you need it.

Cloud providers also manage global distribution of services to ensure low latency. The following image shows the AWS regional data center locations combined with underwater internet cabling:

This reduces the amount of things you have to worry about for analytics. It allows you to focus more on the business application and less on the technology. This is a good thing and you should take advantage of it.

An example of a managed service is Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS). SQS is a message queue where the underlying server, storage, and compute needs are managed automatically by AWS systems. You only need to set it up and configure it, which takes just a few minutes.