<Cloud>
What is Cloud computing?
Imagine a virtual place, which helps you to deliver all your computing services (servers, storage, DB, networking, software, analytics & intelligence) over the internet. Presenting you the concept "Cloud" which is the most used word in daily life among engineers.
As real cloud is a dense group of water molecules, cloud on internet is bunch of servers.
<Cloud> Types:
Public: Owned & managed by a third-party cloud service provider over the internet. Azure, AWS, GCP are real time examples of public cloud.
Private: Cloud services located physically on the company's data center / third-party services hosted in a private network. Any online service which you can access only within the same network of your company is the best example.
Hybrid: Public + Private --> Hybrid. A server located in company's data center but stores it file in a cloud is Hybrid cloud.
<Cloud> Services:
Infrastructure as a service <IaaS>: You rent IT infra - servers and virtual machines (VMs), storage, networks, operating systems - from a cloud provider on a pay-as-you-go basis. Ex: All Public/Private cloud.
Platform as a service<PaaS>: You rent Infra + Platform of the cloud. Ex: Oracle Databases, Docker, Google app Engine
Serverless computing: Overlapping with PaaS, serverless computing focuses on building app functionality without spending time continually managing the servers and infrastructure required to do so. The cloud provider handles the setup, capacity planning and server management for you.
Software as a service<SaaS>: You rent the entire software along with its infra and platform. Ex: Microsoft 365 apps, Google services
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Other <XaaS>: Database as a service (DBaaS), Storage-as-a-Service), desktop as a service (DaaS), communications as a service (CaaS), monitoring as a service (MaaS) and even malware as a service (MaaS).
<Uses>:
Why <Cloud>?
Do I/we as an organization, need cloud?
YES, if you are spending lot of time with your servers, and your server/storage level architecture is old to adapt new changes from your developer. You often clean your storage & backing up is a big headache for you. My end users are global and infinite, and the count is not a constant. Need to automate few of my business process but without putting more manual efforts. I need to grow my business and scale up my service based on the end user needs with no time.
NO, if you are budget specific about the server architecture, your user numbers are finite, and they will remain the same. Application/service will be same after 10 years with no update in tech/security.
<Cloud> Security: When implementing cloud, the first question is about the cost of it. Though it is an investment, the main thing arises in mind is the security of the service we invest in. Despite of Public/Private/Hybrid, the storage will be in cloud and what if the data from the cloud is leaked. This is a very basic question to ask/think. It is always in the hands of the service provider who pitches his/her brand of cloud to you. Before buying we need to know are they having their own Datacenters, or they rent it for a third-party agent. Ok, I see a provider who is having own datacenter, then can I blindly invest it? Absolutely no! The reliability of the service provider & the security firewalls implemented on the server matters. Example, SSO for the server and confidentiality of the sensitive data and the frequent reports on the server login and immediate response on threats is the basic things to note.
Comment if this security topic interest you more, I can publish a separate article just for cloud security practices.
Then, why wait? Try to understand the need for your organization and if this practice helps, well you know what you need to do :)
Thanks for reading till this.
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Great minds discuss ideas!, I'm Aswin RAM, meet you in my next post. Keep learning, Keep sharing, Bubye!
