What is Cloud Computing?:
Introduction
The phrase 'cloud computing' has been used heavily within the IT industry for many years now and across many different sectors, such as retail and finance, and it's often referred to simply as the cloud. Now, cloud computing is a rapidly growing technology, and the adoption of this is a key strategy for many organizations and there's a very good reason for this. It changes the landscape of how many companies and organizations operate on a huge scale with significant business technical advantages and benefits that can't be ignored.
Definition
Cloud computing is a remote virtual pool of on-demand shared resources including computing, storage, network, and many more services that can be rapidly deployed at scale.
There may be a couple of terms within this definition that are new to you or not too clear, such as virtual or compute. Now, don't worry, I'm going to break these down:
Compute objects provide the brains to process your workloads, including what's required to process and run requests from applications and services. Compute resources in the cloud are comparable to these. Storage resources simply allow you to save your data across a shared environment. Any object that allows you to save your data in the cloud is classed as a storage resource.
Classic environment comparison, in a typical environment, these would be seen as your server hard disk or your network-attached storage, NAS, which is far-level shared storage accessed over the network, and your high-speed storage area network, your SAN, used for block-level shared storage. Network resources provide connectivity allowing all other resources, such as computing and storage, to communicate with each other. In a classic environment comparison, you would find hardware such as routers to route traffic between networks, switches that provide the backbone of your network connectivity allowing hosts to talk to one another, and firewalls to allow or deny traffic into the environment.
Cloud Deployment Models:
Typically within cloud computing, there are four different cloud model types, each offering different levels of management and security. These are public, private, hybrid, and community. Let's start with the public cloud.
A public cloud model is where the vendor makes available the use of shared infrastructure and resources that can be provisioned on-demand and typically accessed over the internet for public usage. The consumer will never see the hardware used, nor know the exact location of their data, but they will be able to specify the geographic location to aid with speed of performance, depending on where end users are located. It makes sense from a design perspective to host your infrastructure as close to the geographical region as your customers or end users are in order to reduce latency for your users.
A private cloud is different from a public cloud in that the infrastructure is privately hosted, managed, and owned by the individual company using it, giving greater and more direct control of its data. Enterprises who wish to keep a tighter grasp of security control may adopt this architecture. As a result, the hardware is usually held on-premises. How this differs from a typical on-premises server farm approach is that the same cloud principles are applied to the design, such as the use of virtualization, creating a pool of shared compute, storage, and network resources, making use of scalability and on-demand provisioning.
A hybrid cloud, as you may have already guessed, is a cloud model that makes use of both public and private clouds. This model may be used for seasonal burst traffic or disaster recovery. A hybrid model is established when a network link is configured between the private cloud to services within the public cloud, essentially extending the logical internal network. This takes the benefits given from both the public and private models and allows you to architect your services in the most appropriate model.
A community cloud is a type of Cloud computing service that several organizations share with similar needs and concerns, such as security, compliance, or specific regulatory requirements. It allows these organizations to collaborate and share resources while benefiting from cloud services' scalability and flexibility. Essentially, it combines the advantages of both public and private clouds, providing a shared infrastructure that is tailored to meet the specific needs of the community.
Next, we have: Key Cloud Concepts!
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