What do roads, airports, the internet, the electricity network, and a search engine have in common? They are all services that are independent of a specific user or usage. They are provisioned on a longer timescale than that of an individual usage. And they are typically not owned by their users, or at least, not directly.
In this book I am mostly concerned with digital infrastructures. Their services are digitally accessible. Of the above examples, the internet and the search engine are the best examples of that. Interestingly, the other services increasingly rely on digital infrastructures themselves, or even incorporate specific digital infrastructures. An example of that are the trading platforms that enable the planning of electricity supply and demand. In many countries, electricity is a market, not a monopoly, which requires coordination between the various players.
You’ll also see that I talk about digital infrastructures as a service, not a product. It is not sufficient to buy a road, for example. For it to be truly useful to its users, it needs maintenance, repairs, incident management, and more. Any abandoned road will soon deteriorate without maintenance, and become useless.
Digital infrastructures are sometimes called platforms. In the 1990s Windows was an example of a platform. A few decades later the concept of platform engineering started to be used for services that helped developers develop and deliver code faster. x It will be hard to define it with scientific rigor, in the same way that it is hard to unambiguously define what, for example, a car is. There will always be edge cases.
What sets digital infrastructures apart in my opinion is that, thanks to automation, their scale, geographical reach and deployment speed can be orders of magnitude bigger than that of other infrastructures. That has a lot in interesting effects, which we’ll explore in this book.
In summary, digital infrastructures are about services that organisations deliver to independent consumers, while at the same time these services are subject to automation. That gives a tremendous dynamic in that relationship, and leads to new value, new power, and new risk.