The phrase Cloud Computing has been used heavily within the IT industry for many years now, and more recently it’s been used within other sectors as well. It is a rapidly growing technology, and the adoption of this is a key strategy for many organizations and there’s a many good reasons for this.Below is a brief Q & A session to introduce this amazing technology to you.
Q: What is the Cloud Computing?
A: Cloud computing is a remote virtual pool of on demand shared resources offering compute, storage and network services that can be rapidly deployed at scale.
Q: What are the Cloud Deployment Models?
A: A public cloud model is where a vendor makes available the use of shared infrastructure, including compute storage and network resources that can be provisioned on demand and typically accessed over the internet for public usage
A private cloud model is different to a public cloud in that the infrastructure is privately hosted, managed and owned by the individual company using it, giving it greater and more direct control of its data.
A hybrid cloud model is established when a network link is configured between the private cloud to the services within the public cloud, essentially extending the logical internal network.
Q: What are the key Cloud Concepts?
A: On demand resourcing -This means that when you want to provision a source within the cloud, it’s almost immediately available to you.
Scalable – It offers you the ability to rapidly scale your environment’s resources, such as your computer storage and network.
Flexibility and Elasticity – You can choose to have as many or as few resources you require. You decide how much and how long you want them for, and at what scale. There are no retention contracts to adhere to for services.
Growth – It offers your organization the ability to grow using a wide range of resources and services.
Utility based metering – You only pay for what you use.
Shared infrastructure – Hosts within the cloud are virtualized. As a result, multiple tenants can be running instances on the same piece of hardware.
Highly available – By design, many of the core services with the public cloud and its underlying infrastructure are replicated across different geographic zones.
Secure – This is achieved by adhering to a shared responsibility model between the vendor and yourself.
Q: What are the Cloud service Models?
A: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – The highest level of customization and management is offered by Infrastructure as a Service providers.
Platform as a Service (PaaS) – Platform as a Service providers give a greater level of management and control to you as you have access to a framework from the operating system and upwards.
Software as a Service (SaaS) – Software as a Service allows for the delivery of an application that can be widely distributed and accessed.
XaaS – There are a number of other service models defined as XaaS which is essentially anything as a service such as Disaster Recovery as a Service, Communications as a Service, Monitoring as a Service, etc.
Q: What are the common uses of Cloud Computing?
A: There are many uses. But below can be considered as the major uses of cloud computing.
• Migration of Production Services
• Traffic Bursting
• Backup / Disaster Recovery
• Big Data / Data Manipulation
• Web Hosting
• Testing and Development
• Proof of Concept