Cloud Computing Primer
Understand the basics of Cloud Computing in 8 minutes.
I have worked in the Technology field for 21 years, and have seen different applications and methodologies come and often recede. In the early 2000’s, technical architecture involved the design and procurement of technical infrastructure and the placement of it in dedicated data centers. Several years ago, I first heard about this new thing called cloud computing.
What is Cloud Computing?
Sometimes, the easiest explanation is an analogy. At the dawn of the industrial revolution, plants generated their own electricity. This transitioned over to centralized production of electricity. In the same way, cloud computing takes a specific need (in this case technical infrastructure) and makes it available as a service (aka IaaS, or Infrastructure as a Service). This service is already provisioned to the user and requires no advance warning or planning on the part of the user, much like turning on the lights or any other utility.
The Case for Cloud Computing
Cloud computing makes sense for several reasons.
- On-demand availability — A user or company can purchase as much or as little computing power as they need, when they need it. The alternative is to greatly over-exceed your average computing needs and provision for peak operating performance. This, however, leads to tremendous under-utilized capacity for the remainder of the year. Alternately, you could provision your average needs. This also leads to excess capacity at some times, and not enough at other times.
- Economies of Scale — Large cloud service providers such as Amazon (aka AWS), Google, and Microsoft Azure procure and manage large data centers around the globe. They have deep expertise in managing large-scale data center operations. Also, because they buy more, they can gain greater discounts from hardware manufacturers. These savings are passed on to the end user.
- Core Competencies — Organizations are experts at their own data and use cases. Allowing their developers to focus on analyzing their own business data and not worrying about the details of technical infrastructure such as procuring, patching, and managing hardware, provides a tremendous organizational advantage.
- Security — Security in a cloud-managed environment increases because cloud service providers can dedicate resources to ensuring the protection of their client’s data. Cloud providers also have a higher level of expertise than their customers on security due to it being a core competence.
- Availability — A well-architected cloud infrastructure allows for data to be stored across multiple regions and availability zones. Because of this, data has a very high durability, and in the event of a natural disaster can be easily and quickly recovered.
Client-server Model
Cloud computing makes use of the client-server model. In this, the client is thought of as the requester, and the server is the resource that fulfills that request. Think of going into a restaurant or coffee house and requesting (client) a drink and then the house or restaurant (server) fulfilling that request.
However, what occurs when there is too many requests for the house to fulfill? The requests must be fulfilled from elsewhere. This function in cloud computing is fulfilled by what is known as a load balancer or ELB (Elastic Load Balancer). A solid architecture will contain load balancers to manage the workload across servers to ensure that no single resource is over-taxed and holding up the fulfillment of other requests.
Deployment Models
Cloud services can be provided via several deployment models:
Public Cloud — A public cloud is delivered over the public internet. There can be privacy concerns when doing this. AWS offers Direct Connect service so that they customers can securely connect to their data.
VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) — A virtual private cloud allows for a cloud for a single organization to be hosted on hardware that stores other organization’s data as well. This provides the best of both worlds in terms of security vs. virtualization.
Hybrid — In a hybrid model, the enterprise may deploy certain parts of their organization’s data to the cloud that are either public data or less sensitive. Highly sensitive data is then retained in what is known as on-prem, or on-premises data centers.
Conclusion
Cloud computing is here to stay and there is value in it. It is worthwhile to study more on cloud computing as the trend is only moving in that direction. Providers such as Coursera, Udemy and Acloudguru all provide resources for learning more about cloud computing. Also, AWS provides free training at http://www.aws.training. In a future post, I’ll discuss the various certifications available to cloud practitioners.
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