Cloud Computing

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing, often referred to as simply the cloud, is on-demand delivery of IT resources and applications via the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing.
With cloud computing, we don’t need to make large up-front investments in hardware and spend a lot of time managing that hardware. Instead, we can provision exactly the right type and size of computing resources we need.
With cloud computing, we can access as many resources as we need, almost instantly, and only pay for what we use.
Cloud computing provides an easy way to access servers, storage, databases, and a broad set of application services over the Internet.
Cloud computing providers such as AWS own and maintain the network- connected hardware required for these application services, while we provision and use what we need for our workloads.

Advantages of Cloud Computing

3 ways of cloud compute

3 building block of cloud computing are

Saas

Paas

Iaas

Saas (Software as a service)

Software as a service is the easiest way to cloud compute. The software’s are accessed over the internet.

Eg. Google doc, spreadsheet etc. Advantage of saas is

Paas (Platform as a service)

Provides environment and tool for creating new online applications

Eg. Google app engine, salesforce (force.com)

Advantages

Facilitation of hosting capabilities.

Designing and developing the application.

Private or public deployment.

Disadvantage

Application build on one vendor cannot be moved to another.

Iaas (Infrastructure as a Service)

Allow existing application to run on a cloud supplier’s hardware. Iaas comes in 4 categories

1. Private cloud

2. Dedicated host

3. Hybrid hosting

4. Cloud hosting

Aws works on iaas.

Advantages

The application is hosted centrally

Software testing takes place at a faster rate

Reduction in IT operational cost.

Cloud types

Public Cloud

Service providers use the internet to make resources, such as applications, storage
Examples of public clouds include Amazon web service, IBM’s Blue Cloud, Sun Cloud, Google compute engine and Windows Azure Services Platform.
For users, these types of clouds will provide the best economies of scale, are inexpensive to set-up because hardware, application and bandwidth costs are covered by the provider. It’s a pay-per-usage model and the only costs incurred are based on the capacity that is used.

Disadvantages

the public cloud may not be the right fit for every organization. The model can limit configuration, security, and SLA specificity, making it less-than-ideal for services using sensitive data that is subject to compliancy regulations

Private cloud

Private clouds are data center architectures owned by a single company that provides flexibility, scalability, provisioning, automation and monitoring.
The goal of a private cloud is not sell “as-a-service” offerings to external customers but instead to gain the benefits of cloud architecture without giving up the control of maintaining your own data center.
Private clouds can be expensive, so most typically use by large enterprises. Private clouds are driven by concerns around security and compliance, and keeping assets within the firewall.

Hybrid Cloud

By using a Hybrid approach, companies can maintain control of an internally managed private cloud while relying on the public cloud as needed. For instance, during peak periods individual applications, or portions of applications can be migrated to the Public Cloud.
This will also be beneficial during predictable outages: hurricane warnings, scheduled maintenance windows, rolling brown/blackouts.

Community Cloud

A community cloud is a multi-tenant infrastructure that is shared among several organizations from a specific group with common computing concerns.

Last updated 5 years ago