Cloud Strategies: Which Cloud Deployment Model is the Right One?
In today’s ever-evolving technology landscape, the cloud offers a vast array of benefits, including scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency. With these benefits in mind, businesses are increasingly turning to cloud technologies; however, choosing the right strategy can be a pretty scary task, so where do you begin? This blog post provides insights into the different cloud deployment models to help you determine the most suitable option for your needs.
Public Cloud
Public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP host shared infrastructure, known as public clouds. This offers a range of benefits due to its size and scale, with a pay-as-you-go pricing model, organisations can significantly reduce their capital expenditure quickly and easily. Scalability is another key benefit, enabling businesses to seamlessly scale at the touch of a button based on their demand. With a wide range of services to choose from across all major public cloud vendors, businesses can be agile and quickly adapt to changing requirements and client needs.
Whether utilising EC2 for scalable virtual servers or a complete corporate enterprise network set-up, there are many examples of public cloud being utilised by big businesses day-to-day.
Key Considerations for Public Cloud:
- Whilst all public cloud providers implement robust security measures, sharing resources, servers, and other various pieces of hardware with other companies can cause an element of concern.
- Public cloud solutions rely heavily on a network connection, which could have an impact on productivity at times.
- Some organisations may struggle to meet specific regulations and compliance requirements within a public cloud architecture.
- Due to the enhanced flexibility and scalability of the cloud, keeping costs within budget may be increasingly difficult without policies put in place.
- Vendor lock-in may be an issue if you are only utilising a single cloud vendor.
Private Cloud
A private cloud is a single cloud computing environment reserved for a single customer or organisation. This allows for a higher level of security and control over data due to the dedicated hardware and increased flexibility, enabling strict compliance and regulatory requirements to be met.
A common use case for private cloud is the banking sector, where compliance and security are top priorities. Other examples include an on-premise VMware setup or OpenStack private architecture.
Key private cloud considerations:
- Building and maintaining a private cloud comes at a large upfront cost, along with additional ongoing operational costs. The specialist knowledge to maintain a private cloud could be a challenge for some organisations.
- The scalability of a private cloud will be limited by the amount of infrastructure that is available. Careful capacity planning is required at the time of design.
Hybrid Cloud
Being a combination of both private and public clouds, a hybrid cloud allows businesses the flexibility and benefits of both cloud models. You can select where workloads reside, enabling optimal placement for compliance, resource, and performance requirements. A hybrid cloud strategy enables organisations to balance their infrastructure, receiving the cost benefits and scalability of the public cloud alongside the ability to run workloads with specific regulatory and compliance requirements.
Use cases for hybrid cloud include enabling the ability to meet seasonal capacity requirements, e.g., Black Friday, or reducing latency by enabling the deployment of an application close to the end user.
AWS Outposts is a service that enables a seamless hybrid cloud setup, running AWS services both on-premises and in the cloud.
Key Considerations of Hybrid Cloud:
- Complexity is significantly increased with a hybrid cloud setup due to a more complex architecture.
- Data transfer costs can be expensive, which has to be factored in when deciding on a hybrid cloud setup due to the potential transfer costs for a large amount of data.
- Network bandwidth needs to be consistent.
Multi-Cloud
Multi-cloud means multiple public clouds, using different cloud providers to mitigate against vendor lock-ins and taking advantage of the best services from each provider. This enables you to choose which services best fit your business needs, alongside increasing reliability and/or redundancy by spreading functionality across different cloud providers.
A great example of multi-cloud can be explored in the case study below.
Key Considerations
- With the use of multiple clouds comes an increased variety of services and technologies available for use, so choosing the correct service is vital.
- There is an enhanced requirement for governance and security policies to make sure applications are secure and compliant across all cloud providers.
- A multi-cloud deployment means that complete visibility becomes more difficult due to the use of different cloud vendors.
Hybrid Multi-Cloud
Being a combination of all the above, hybrid multi-cloud combines public and private infrastructure across multiple cloud vendors. This provides the ultimate flexibility and is ideal when organisations have complex requirements that need the best of both worlds.
Which cloud model is right for you?
When it comes to choosing the best cloud model for your organisation, it is important to keep in mind your unique needs and requirements. Don’t forget to consider important factors such as security, compliance, budget, and scalability.
About the author
Laura Gardner is an AWS Architect here at Version 1.
