A Beginner’s Guide To Cloud
We can find a extensive list of definition across platforms for CLOUD, its more important how we follow with the learning and implementing it various industries.
Let’s start with establishing a common understanding of the cloud and related terms:
What is Cloud?
Cloud is a term used to describe globally available storage and computing resources. It is essentially a datacenter that provides a remote and virtualized infrastructure.
What is Cloud Computing?
Cloud Computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources (compute, storage, databases, and networking), especially data storage or cloud storage, without direct active management by the user.
In general, we can also brief cloud computing as a “Methodology that enables highly available and quickly scalable resources”. It provides services to provision and deliver resources via the Internet. It helps in reducing infrastructure management, cost reduction and makes application development and maintenance easy.
As cloud computing has grown in popularity, several different models and deployment strategies have emerged to help meet specific needs of different users. Each type of cloud service, and deployment method, provides you with different levels of control, flexibility, and management. Understanding the differences between these models and deployment methods help you decide what set of services is right for your needs.
Types of Cloud Deployment Models
Cloud Deployment Models are defined according to where the infrastructure for the deployment resides. These clouds utilize similar infrastructure but have different management approaches.
Public (On-Cloud) : Public clouds are the most cost-effective, common services and operated by third-party cloud service providers. With this type of cloud computing, all the software, hardware and supporting infrastructure is owned, operated and managed by the cloud provider. It provides pool resources to serve multiple customers on shared hardware. Companies adopting public clouds just need to create an account, and can access and manage all services through web browsers.
Private (On-Premises) : Private cloud consists of computing resources that are owned and utilized by a single organization or business. Companies operating an internal private cloud have datacenters within the organization and managed on a private network, providing more control over the services. Increased control allows companies the ability to customize security systems and utilization of hardware and resources.
Hybrid : Hybrid clouds is a combination of both private and public clouds. Companies can utilize on-premises infrastructure to keep their sensitive business-critical information and public cloud services for their scalability, to manage high-volume traffic data flow from users. Hybrid cloud gives business more flexibility and helps them to optimize infrastructure and security.
Community : Community cloud permists sharing of computing resources, services and information by a group of different organization of a specific community. Generally, it is owned and operate by one or more organization in a community, or by a third-party service provider, or a combination of both.
Types of Cloud Computing Services
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), requires the most user management of all the cloud services. The user is responsible for managing the operating systems, data, and applications. With IaaS services, a company can consume compute servers, known as “instances”, on-demand. This means that the hardware and software stack are managed for you. You then need to choose which operating system to use with your instance (e.g. Linux or Windows) and you are responsible for the configuration and management of the operating system and any software you install on it. Each compute instance will have an allocated storage capacity, and cloud networking functions such as routing, firewalls, and load balancers can be configured.
- Platform as a Service (PaaS), requires less user management. The cloud provider manages the operating systems, and the user is responsible for the applications and data they run and store. With PaaS, the cloud service provider manages the infrastructure layer and also the middleware, development tools, business intelligence (BI) services, database management systems and more. This allows developers to concentrate on their code without needing to manage the environment on which it runs. Developers simply upload their code to build web applications. PaaS is designed to support the complete web application life cycle: building, testing, deploying, managing, and updating.
- Software as a Service (SaaS), requires the least amount of management. The cloud provider is responsible for managing everything, and the end-user just uses the software. SaaS is a service model where software applications are delivered over the Internet. In the consumer space, examples include Gmail, Facebook and Dropbox — these services are ready to use, no coding required, you just use them. With SaaS the entire stack is managed for you, though you will often have some limited scope to configure the service according to your needs.
Below are some of the basic examples of different cloud service providers with their different types of cloud services.
The major reason of cloud services adoption by many organizations is its cost saving potential. Cloud computing gives the freedom to use services as per the requirement and pay only for what you use without the expenses of hardware infrastructure.
What we get as Benefits of Cloud Computing?
- Reduce costs for both CAPEX or capital expense : investment in acquiring physical space to setup data centers and OPEX or operational expense : investment in managing technical team to run data centers.
- Guessing Capacity: No matter the size or type of your company, IT needs will change over time. Cloud computing allows you to scale i.e., increase or modify computing capabilities without investing in the physical infrastructure. Not only does this reduce spending on costly hardware, but it also allows for quicker IT stack (Vertical or Horizontal) changes.
- Increase Speed and Agility: Agility refers to the power to move quickly and easily. Cloud Agility provides the ability to rapidly develop, test and launch applications that drive business growth in a constantly changing IT environment.
The future of cloud computing — what can we expect next?
Cloud technology can make your business efficient, secure, and accessible. It is changing the technical perspective of the way users interact with end-to-end applications and programs by providing immense capabilities to support agility and accessibility.
With more and more companies getting comfortable with their data being on the cloud, no doubt that there will be a continued dominance of significant cloud providers. Now that you know what cloud computing is, how it is used and its benefits, there is no reason why you shouldn’t get started with the learning and join the league of the most celebrated cloud computing experts of all time.
P.S. If you read it till the end, Thank you!…
This article is part of AWS Career Growth Program (AWS-CGP) by Pravin Mishra
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