Theory And Practice Of Cloud Services Networking

The very first question asked when talking about clouds – what is cloud computing? In fact, we need to look a little broader and determine what is cloud computing and what are the products that are based on this technology (including cloud hosting). A broad but strict definition of cloud hosting is adopted at the National Institute of Standards and Technology USA. It includes five basic principles that any product must match to be called cloudy.

Let’s consider the defining principles:

“On-demand self-service” is the principle of accessibility of any volume of services. The user can buy any volume of services of a cloud product independently, the purchase and activation of services should not take much time. In the original “renting takes minutes”, that is, the purchase takes several minutes. “Ubiquitous network access” is the principle of network accessibility. Cloud solution should be available from any computer or phone anywhere in the world at any time. “Metered use” is the principle of payment as per usage. The cloud product should accurately calculate the amount of services consumed at each moment, while this volume of services should be paid for. “Elasticity” is the principle of purchasing flexibility. The user can order as a very small number of services and use them for a long time (for example, ten months), and order a large amount of services (ten times as much) and use for a shorter period of time (month). “Resource pooling” is the principle of independence from the “iron”. The user does not know and it does not matter what hardware node of the cloud his virtual machines are running now (or the applications provided to him are running, for the case with SaaS). If one hardware node fails, users should not experience inconvenience or inoperability of services (the regional product should not depend on the operability of one particular hardware node).

Make a note that clouds differ from traditional hosting solutions:

Unlike dedicated servers, installation and configuration of which takes a lot of time, cloud services should be available for use immediately after purchase. The same goes for most classical data center services; Unlike shared-hosting, in the clouds there is an opportunity to increase the volume of purchased capacities instantly, without contacting the operator’s technical support service; Unlike everything that was on the hosting market before the clouds, cloud products provide a payment plan for the fact (I really like “pay as you grow”), that is, pay only for the power that the user really uses with a fairly short interval of charging. These are the five basic principles by which you can clearly distinguish cloud products. However, as I wrote above, they are quite broad, albeit strict. In the concept of a cloud product, there are three types of delivery of the product to the user according to the degree of flexibility are stacked. This is the provision of infrastructure as a service (for rent), a platform as a service or an application as a service.

What are IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS?

Cloud hosting is renting a service for certain site or application in compliance with the above-mentioned principles. But in fact, IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS are completely different products, created for different purposes.

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