Cloud is the future

Cloud is the future

Introduction

Are you new to Cloud?  Curious to know how the cloud play major role currently as well as in future? then you are in right place.  Let’s start with what’s mean by Cloud Computing, it’s method of on demand delivering compute services like storage, database, server, networking, software etc. over the Internet (“The Cloud”).  The beauty of cloud compute is pay as you go model, you don’t need to spend too much of cost for infrastructure setup upfront.

Let’s look at below topics as part of this post.

  • Why Cloud becoming popular?
  • Cloud Deployment Models
  • Cloud Service Models
  • Key Cloud Concepts
  • Different Cloud Providers
  • Why AWS?

 

Why Cloud becoming popular?

               To know why cloud becoming more popular we need to understand the difference between pre-cloud/on-premises and Cloud.  On-premises computing refers to computing resources that are owned, operated, and managed by an organization on its own premises, while cloud computing refers to computing resources that are owned, operated, and managed by a third-party provider and delivered over the Internet.  Cloud saves cost, easy for maintenance and upgrades, it's good in scalability and accessibility day to day Business as well as during disaster recovery.

Below table compare the On-premises Vs Cloud key differences.

        On-premies

•       Companies must make a large upfront investment in hardware, software, and infrastructure.

•       Companies are responsible for maintaining and upgrading their own hardware and software.

•       Companies must make upfront investments in additional hardware to meet increased demand.

•       Resources are generally only accessible from within the company's own premises.

•       Generally less resilient to disasters, as it relies on a single set of resources.


Cloud

•       Allows companies to pay as you go model, only for the resources they use on need basis.

•       The cloud provider is responsible for infrastructure maintenance, no or low upfront costs for companies.

•       Companies to quickly and easily auto scale (Vertical/Horizontal) their computing resources up or down as needed.

•       Resources can be accessed from anywhere with an Internet connection.

•       Often have multiple, geographically distribute data centers, making it easier for businesses to ensure their data is safe and recoverable in the event of a disaster.

•       Cloud Market Place for the products.


Cloud Deployment Models

    Most of the applications are built using Cloud Native or Cloud Agnostic or Cloud Hybrid.

  • Cloud Native — Build applications using only services related to specific cloud platform. As all the services are from the same Cloud Provider, the applications can be built rapidly due to the seamless integration between the services.
  • Cloud Agnostic — Build applications using products from 3rd party providers. The advantage of using this approach is enterprises will not be locked into specific cloud provider.
  • Cloud Hybrid — Build applications using combination of products from 3rd party providers as well as services provided by underlying cloud provider.

 

Cloud Service Models

IAAS (Infrastructure as a Service), PAAS (Platform as a Service), and SAAS (Software as a Service) are three main delivery models for cloud computing services.  IAAS provides raw infrastructure, PAAS provides a platform for building and running applications, and SAAS provides ready-to-use applications.

IAAS provides virtualized computing resources such as virtual machines, storage, and networking over the internet. Customers can use these resources to build and run their own applications.

PAAS provides a platform for customers to develop, run, and manage applications without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. The platform usually includes services such as database, web servers, and middleware.

SAAS is a model where software applications are delivered over the internet and managed by a third-party provider. Customers can access the software through a web browser or a lightweight client, without having to install or manage the underlying infrastructure or platform.

 

Key Cloud Concepts

    Cloud has many good features and lists below few of them.

  • Virtualization: The process of creating a virtual version of something, such as a operating system, a server, or storage, that can run on top of existing physical hardware.
  • Scalability: The ability of a system to handle increased demand by adding or removing resources as needed.
  • Elasticity: The ability of a system to automatically adjust its resource utilization based on demand.
  • Resilience: The ability of a system to recover from failures and continue to function without disruption.
  • Auto-scaling: The ability of a system to automatically adjust its resource utilization based on predefined rules and policies.
  • Load balancing: The process of distributing workloads across multiple servers to optimize resource utilization, increase reliability, and improve performance.
  • Storage as a Service (STaaS): A cloud computing service that provides customers with remote storage capacity over the internet.
  • Disaster recovery: The process of recovering from a disruptive event, such as a natural disaster or data center failure, to ensure continued operation of a system.
  • Multi-tenancy: A principle in cloud computing where multiple customers share the same infrastructure, but each customer's data and applications are isolated from those of other customers.
  • Hybrid cloud: A hybrid cloud is a combination of public and private cloud services, allowing organizations to benefit from the strengths of both environments while avoiding.

 

Different Cloud Providers

    There are several cloud platforms in the market. Here are some of the popular choices related to public cloud.

  • Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  • Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
  • Microsoft Azure



On top of above Public Cloud Platforms, some enterprises also setup Private Cloud using IBM OpenShift.

 

Why AWS?

AWS is the most popular choice when it comes to the Cloud Platform. Here are some of the advantages to choose AWS.

  • Widely used across the globe.
  • Multiple data centers, popularly known as AWS Regions.
  • Robust market place with sophisticated products provided by AWS itself as well as 3rd party providers.
  • Ability to automate using multiple approaches — AWS boto3, Ansible, Cloud Formation, Terraform, etc.
  • AWS Native Services are grouped into different categories.

 Here are the details of some of the key services under AWS Analytics for Data Engineering.

  • AWS s3 — Data Lake Storage to store the data at scale. It provides low cost options such as Glacier to keep the storage costs under control while meeting the key SLAs.
  • AWS EMR — It is popularly known as Elastic Map Reduce and provides services such as Hadoop, Spark, etc for distributed computing.
  • AWS DMS — Data Migration Service to get data from different sources into the Data Lake. It is primarily used for baseline data ingestion as well as incremental batch data ingestion.
  • AWS Kinesis and MSK — MSK stands Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka. Both Kinesis and MSK are fully managed AWS services to get data into Data Lake in streaming fashion.
  • Glue Catalog — To maintain metadata of the databases and tables on top of data stored in s3. These databases and tables can be used by wide variety of SQL based engines in AWS such as Athena, Redshift Spectrum, Databricks, Spark SQL, etc.
  • Amazon Athena — A serverless SQL engine on top of the data stored in AWS s3.
  • Amazon Redshift — A fully compliant MPP Data Warehouse fully managed by AWS. Typically reporting tools connect to Redshift to provide reports to the business users.


Conclusion

    Pay as you use model in cloud reduce upfront infrastructure investments and utilize the latest and greatest servers in few minutes by click.  Utilize the Cloud service providers infrastructure to focus on business need and make global presence and reduce the cost based on your business demand and supply.

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