Business Technology, for the Win - Cloud Computing

At its core, the cloud offers the ability for companies to dynamically scale their computing capability faster and farther than they would be able to do if they had to procure, install and maintain the hardware on-premise. This has been the secret to success for the three major players in the cloud computing space - Amazon Web Services (AWS) , Google Cloud , and Microsoft Azure.

As they have matured, so has their catalog of services. As you build out your cloud architecture, it is important to be able to understand what offerings are available in these three environments and how to pull them together for a unified ecosystem capable of supporting all of your computing needs.

Amazon

Elastic Compute (EC2) - this core service offers the broadest and deepest computing platform available from Amazon Web Services. It has hundreds of instances and choices of processors, storage, networking configurations, and operating systems to match the needs of your workload. In essence, it gives you a complete virtual machine where you have control from the operating system level up.

Elastic Beanstalk -  is a service for deploying and scaling web applications and services. You upload your code and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment—from capacity provisioning, load balancing, and auto-scaling to application health monitoring.

Lambda - is a serverless, event-driven compute service that lets you run code for virtually any type of application or backend service without provisioning or managing servers. You can trigger Lambda from hundreds of AWS services and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. The costing model allows you to only pay for what you use.

Lightsail - offers easy-to-use virtual private server (VPS) instances, containers, storage, and databases at a cost-effective monthly price. Using pre-configured development stacks like LAMP, Nginx, MEAN, and Node.js., you can quickly and easily get web applications operational.

Batch - lets developers, scientists, and engineers efficiently run hundreds of thousands of batch and matching learning (ML) computing jobs while optimizing compute resources, so you can focus on analyzing results and solving problems. AWS Batch is a fully managed batch computing service that plans, schedules, and runs your containerized batch or ML workloads.

Fargate - is a serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine that lets you focus on building applications without managing servers. It allows you to deploy and manage your application containers, not infrastructure. This service removes the operational overhead of scaling, patching, securing, and managing servers.

Outposts - is a family of fully managed solutions delivering AWS infrastructure and services to virtually any on-premises or edge location for a truly consistent hybrid experience. Outposts solutions allow you to extend and run native AWS services on-premises. It is available in a variety of sizes and even supports multiple rack deployments. With AWS Outposts, you can run some AWS services locally and connect to a broad range of services available in the local AWS Region. This allows you to run applications and workloads on-premises using familiar AWS services, tools, and APIs. AWS Outposts also supports workloads and devices requiring low latency access to on-premises systems, local data processing, data residency, and application migration with local system interdependencies. 

App Runner - is a fully managed container application service that lets you build, deploy, and run containerized web applications and API services without prior infrastructure or container experience.

WorkSpaces - is a fully managed, all-inclusive virtual desktop solution that you can provide to workers with lightweight terminals. This solution provides virtual workspace for varied worker types, especially hybrid and remote workers. This also enables the ability to keep sensitive corporate data off of bring-your-own-device (BYOD) devices.

Google

Compute Engine - is the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) component of Google Cloud Platform (GCP). It provides secure and customizable compute services that let you create and run virtual machines on Google’s infrastructure. They provide you with the option of going with different machine families, including general-purpose, compute-optimized, or memory-optimized.

App Engine - allows you to build monolithic server-side rendered websites. App Engine supports popular development languages (including Node.js, Java, Ruby, C#, Go, Python, and PHP) with a range of developer tools.

Cloud Functions - allows you to run your code in the cloud with no servers or containers to manage. It is a scalable, pay-as-you-go functions as a service (FaaS) product.

Cloud Run - allows you to build and deploy scalable containerized apps written in any language (including Go, Python, Java, Node.js, .NET, and Ruby) on a fully managed platform.

Graphics Processing Units (GPU) - provides cloud-based, high-performance GPUs for machine learning, scientific computing, and 3D visualization.

Knative - is a Kubernetes-based platform to build, deploy, and manage modern serverless workloads. Knative takes care of the details of networking, autoscaling (even to zero), and revision tracking. Teams can focus on core logic using any programming language.

Microsoft Azure

Machines - allows you to create Linux and Windows virtual machines (VMs) quickly. You can choose Linux or Windows images or you can deploy your own VM image or download images from the Azure Marketplace.

Functions - allows you to develop more efficiently with an event-driven, serverless compute platform that helps solve complex orchestration problems. The Azure Functions end-to-end development experience enables you to use familiar languages including C#, JavaScript, F#, Java, PowerShell, Python, and TypeScript. You can build and debug locally without additional setup, deploy and operate at scale in the cloud, and integrate services using triggers and bindings.

Batch - is a cloud-scale job scheduling and compute management. At the core of Batch is a high-scale job scheduling engine that’s available to you as a managed service. Use the scheduler in your application to dispatch work. Batch can also work with cluster job schedulers or behind the scenes of your software as a service (SaaS). You don’t need to write your own work queue, dispatcher, or monitor. Batch gives you this as a service.

Container Service (AKS) - offers the quickest way to start developing and deploying cloud-native apps in Azure, data centers, or at the edge with built-in code-to-cloud pipelines and guardrails. You get unified management and governance for on-premises, edge, and multi-cloud Kubernetes clusters. It interoperates with Azure security, identity, cost management, and migration services.

Virtual Desktop - is a service that enables you to provide a secure remote desktop experience from virtually anywhere.

Quantum - is an open ecosystem to write and run code on a diverse selection of today's quantum hardware. It allows you the flexibility to use your preferred development tools with support for Cirq, Qiskit, and Q#.

Whether you are looking for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) or platform-as-a-service (PaaS), the choices are vast. These three leading providers of cloud continue to increase their catalog of components that can be assembled in many ways for you to develop a secure and capable cloud environment to run your company's critical computing needs. As a CIO, you don't have to be an expert in these technologies, but understanding what is available and how they work together can facilitate discussions with your cloud architecture team.

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As these components can be assembled in many different configurations, having a clear understanding of each cloud provider and its offerings are important. If you need vendor-agnostic assistance in deciding which cloud provider is optimal for you and your specific use case, Gartner has experts who can provide you with guidance. Research analysts such as Raj Bala , Dennis Smith , Arun Chandrasekaran ,  Wataru Katsurashima , Dave Wright , Craig Lowery, PH.D. , Ed Anderson , David Smith , and Miguel Angel Borrega will provide additional insight into these environments and help you work through the development of your specific architecture.