CompTIA Cloud Essentials+ Study Guide

Exam CLO-002

Quentin Docter, Cory Fuchs

• Publisher: Sybex
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781119642220
• Edition: 2
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119642244
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Certification Guides in Computer Science
• Index: Computer Science

Prepare for success on the New Cloud Essentials+ Exam (CLO-002)

The latest title in the popular Sybex Study Guide series, CompTIA Cloud Essentials+ Study Guide helps candidates prepare for taking the NEW CompTIA Cloud Essentials+ Exam (CLO-002). Ideal for non-technical professionals in IT environments, such as marketers, sales people, and business analysts, this guide introduces cloud technologies at a foundational level. This book is also an excellent resource for those with little previous knowledge of cloud computing who are looking to start their careers as cloud administrators.

The book covers all the topics needed to succeed on the Cloud Essentials+ exam and provides knowledge and skills that any cloud computing professional will need to be familiar with. This skill set is in high demand, and excellent careers await in the field of cloud computing.

• Gets you up to speed on fundamental cloud computing concepts and technologies
• Prepares IT professionals and those new to the cloud for the CompTIA Cloud Essentials+ exam objectives
• Provides practical information on making decisions about cloud technologies and their business impact
• Helps candidates evaluate business use cases, financial impacts, cloud technologies, and deployment models
• Examines various models for cloud computing implementation, including public and private clouds
• Identifies strategies for implementation on tight budgets

Inside is everything candidates need to know about cloud concepts, the business principles of cloud environments, management and technical operations, cloud security, and more. Readers will also have access to Sybex's superior online interactive learning environment and test bank, including chapter tests, practice exams, electronic flashcards, and a glossary of key terms.

Chapter 1
Cloud Principles and Design

The following CompTIA Cloud Essentials+ Exam CLO-002 objectives are covered in this chapter:

• 
  1.1 Explain cloud principles.
  • Service models
    • SaaS
    • IaaS
    • PaaS
  • Deployment models
    • Public
    • Private
    • Hybrid
  • Characteristics
    • Elastic
    • Self-service
    • Scalability
    • Broad network access
    • Pay-as-you-go
    • Availability
  • Shared responsibility model
• 
  1.4 Summarize important aspects of cloud design.
  • Redundancy
  • High availability
  • Disaster recovery
  • Recovery objectives
    • RPO
    • RTO

The computer industry is an industry of big, new trends. Every few years, a new technology comes along and becomes popular, until the next wave of newer, faster, and shinier objects comes along to distract everyone from the previous wave. Thinking back over the past few decades, there have been several big waves, including the rise of the Internet, wireless networking, and mobile computing.

The biggest recent wave in the computing world is cloud computing. Its name comes from the fact that the technology is Internet based; in most computer literature, the Internet is represented by a graphic that looks like a cloud. It seems like everyone is jumping on the cloud (pun intended, but doesn’t that sound like fun?), and perhaps you or your company have used cloud technologies already. But to many people, the cloud is still nebulous and maybe even a little scary. There’s a lot to know about the nuts and bolts of cloud computing.

The CompTIA Cloud Essentials+ certification exam assesses cloud knowledge from the perspective of the business analyst. Business analysts come from a variety of backgrounds, including technophiles who have business-facing roles, those who have business acumen but little technical experience, and anywhere in between. This certification—and this study guide—attempts to balance technical data with practical business information. You’ll find some tech-speak here, but we won’t get into the hard-core inner workings of cloud management.

If you’re interested in the more technical side of cloud management, consider the CompTIA Cloud+ certification. To help prepare for it, look for the CompTIA Cloud+ Study Guide, Second Edition, by Todd Montgomery and Stephen Olson (Sybex, 2018).

This chapter starts off by diving into the fundamentals of cloud principles and cloud design. A business analyst (BA) working with cloud providers should understand common service and deployment models, cloud characteristics, and important design aspects such as redundancy, high availability, and disaster recovery.

Understanding Cloud Principles

You hear the term a lot today—the cloud. You’re probably already using cloud services whether you realize it or not. For example, if you store music in iCloud, use Gmail, or use Microsoft Office 365, you are using cloud-based services. But what exactly is the cloud? The way it’s named—and it’s probably due to the word the at the beginning—makes it sound as if it’s one giant, fluffy, magical entity that does everything you could ever want a computer to do. Only it’s not quite that big, fluffy, or magical, and it’s not even one thing. To help illustrate what the cloud is, let’s first consider a pre-cloud example—we’ll call it traditional computing.

Imagine that you are at a small business in the 1980s—you probably have big hair and make questionable choices in the music you listen to—and need to decide if the company should purchase a computer. This decision might sound silly today, but before the mid-1990s, it was one that required many companies to seriously weigh the pros and cons. Desktop computers were almost a luxury item, and kids’ lemonade stands certainly didn’t have card readers to accept mobile payments! Perhaps the accounting department could automate payroll, the sales team could make promotional materials, or the boss just wanted to play solitaire. Regardless of the reason, someone went out and priced computers and made the business case to purchase one.

The computer would be traditional in all senses of the word. It would have a collection of hardware such as a processor, memory, and hard drive, an operating system (OS) that interfaced with the hardware, and one or more applications that allowed employees to complete tasks. Figure 1.1 illustrates this traditional computing model. You can see that the hardware is considered the base, and the OS and apps build upon it.

Figure 1.1 Traditional computing model

Over the years, the company expands, and more employees need computers. Eventually the computers need to talk to each other, and things like centralized storage and a database are required. So along with computers, you have to buy expensive server hardware, storage devices, and networking equipment such as switches, routers, and a firewall. The costs are adding up, and every year it seems like the IT budget gets squeezed. To top it off, every few years much of the hardware becomes obsolete and really should be replaced. The already tight budgets become even more challenging to manage. To add even another complication, software companies keep producing new versions with features that employees say are critical, so the software needs to be upgraded as well. (The same holds true for OSs.)

The pace of innovation can be staggering, and the cost of keeping up can be overwhelming for many businesses. But in the traditional model of computing, it was just the cost of doing business. Then in the late 2000s, cloud computing started changing everything.

Cloud computing is a method by which you access remote servers that provide software, storage, database, networking, or compute services for you. Instead of your company needing to buy the hardware and software, another company does, and yours essentially rents it from them and accesses it over the Internet. There isn’t one cloud but hundreds of commercial clouds in existence today. Many of them are owned by big companies, such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, HP, and Apple. The three most popular ones for businesses are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

One great feature of the cloud is that using it is pretty simple in most cases. If a user can open a web browser and navigate to a website, they can use the cloud. We’ll get into more d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Table of Exercises
• Introduction
• Assessment Test
• Answers to Assessment Test
• Chapter 1 Cloud Principles and Design
• Chapter 2 Cloud Networking and Storage
• Chapter 3 Assessing Cloud Needs
• Chapter 4 Engaging Cloud Vendors
• Chapter 5 Management and Technical Operations
• Chapter 6 Governance and Risk
• Chapter 7 Compliance and Security in the Cloud
• Appendix A Answers to Written Labs
• Appendix B Answers to Review Questions
• Index
• End User License Agreement