Cloud Computing For Dummies

Judith S. Hurwitz, Daniel Kirsch

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119546771
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Informatica
• Subtopic: Elaborazione di dati su cloud

Get your head—and your business—into the Cloud

Cloud computing is no longerjustaclevernew toy in the world of ITinfrastructure. Despitethenebulous name, it's become arealandimportantpart of our information architecture—andtech professionalswho ignore it or try to skim their way through risk falling behind rapidly.The new edition of Cloud ComputingForDummies gets you up to speed fast, clarifying your Cloud options, showing you where can save you time and money, giving you ways to frame your decisions, and helping you avoid weeks of research.

Ina friendly, easy-to-follow style, Cloud ComputingForDummies, 2ndEdition demystifiesthe Cloud's virtuallandscape, breaking upacomplex and multi-layered topic into simple explanations that will make the various benefits clear andultimatelyguide you towardmakingthemost appropriatechoices for your organization.

• Know the business case for the Cloud
• Understand hybridand multi-cloudoptions
• Develop your Cloud strategy
• Get tips on best practices

The Cloudis everywhere, and it can deliver amazing benefits to our lives and businesses. Getamuchclearervision ofexactlyhow with Cloud ComputingForDummies —andyou'llbegin tosee that the sky really is the limit!

Part 1

Understanding Cloud Concepts

IN THIS PART …

Define the cloud.

Explain the different cloud delivery models.

Understand the dynamics of the cloud life cycle.

Embrace the business power of the cloud.

Select the most appropriate cloud models for your goals.

Chapter 1

Understanding the Cloud

IN THIS CHAPTER

Deconstructing cloud concepts

Discovering resource pools/cloud models and services

Evaluating the role of the data center

Finding out how the public cloud fits and when the private cloud shines

There is no debate about it: The cloud is helping to change every business in every industry. The key attributes of the cloud — on-demand access to compute and storage, limitless scaling, and flexible pricing — have allowed startups to challenge well-established industry stalwarts. Likewise, the cloud has enabled established businesses to add new capabilities and transform business process at the speed of change.

The first phase of cloud adoption was mostly about cutting costs and changing technology spend from a capital expense to an operating expense. For many years, cloud vendors were focused on reducing costs for commodity compute and storage. While reducing costs is still a major driver of cloud adoption, companies are now leveraging cloud services to transform their businesses. Most companies have pragmatically adopted a hybrid cloud strategy. They’re managing to use multiple public and private cloud services depending on the business requirements. IT leaders are maintaining key mission critical applications in their data centers while taking advantage of innovative Software as a Service (SaaS) applications and cloud infrastructure services. Increasingly, vendors are specializing so that they can provide differentiated value to customers. Some cloud providers offer machine learning services while others are providing governance cloud services. Other vendors are providing a variety of cloud storage services.

In this chapter, we provide an overview of cloud computing, including the basics you need to understand in order to move forward in the world of hybrid and multicloud environments.

Looking at the Ecosystem of Cloud Computing

It’s important to understand that an ecosystem of participants define the market. This ecosystem consists of three categories of players:

• Consumers of services: These are the end-users that use cloud services in their day-to-day business activities. They may have little understanding of where the service resides or how it is designed; they simply need the capabilities to get the job done.
• Provider of services: These cloud providers offer a variety of functions ranging from infrastructure services to applications and tools.
• Designer of services: These companies build applications and tools. Often services are intended to work within a specific cloud ecosystem or can augment a packaged cloud application.

Understanding Cloud Concepts

Cloud computing is a method of providing shared computing resources, including applications, computing, storage, networking, development, and deployment platforms as well as business processes. Cloud computing makes computing resources easier to use by providing standardization and automation.

Standardization is the implementation of services using a consistent approach supported by a set of consistent interfaces. Likewise, the cloud generally requires that processes be implemented through the use of automation.

Automation is a process that’s triggered based on business rules, resource availability, and security demands. Automation is required to support a self-service provisioning model. To promote efficiency, automation can ensure that after a provisioned service is no longer needed, it is returned to the resource pool. This type of rules-based automation can help with capacity planning and overall workload management.

Most businesses today are already using some kind of cloud service — even if they don’t think of it as a cloud. For example, any company that uses Microsoft 365, Slack, or DocuSign service is using a cloud-based service. A company may use online data backup or collaboration services in a commercial cloud. Your organization may also place advertisements or recruit new employees on an open community cloud like LinkedIn. If your company uses Google’s Gmail service, it is using a cloud email service. Many companies are discovering that having Customer Relationship Management (CRM) available as a service is a better way to support the sales team than the traditional on-premises software options.

You should be getting the idea that cloud computing means that everything — from compute power to computing infrastructure and from applications and business processes to personal collaboration — can be delivered to you as a service. To be operational in the real world, the cloud must be implemented with common standardized processes and automation.

Clouds come in different versions, depending on your needs. There are two primary deployment models of cloud: public and private. Most organizations will use a combination of private computing resources (data centers and private clouds) and public services, where some of the services existing in these environments interact with each other — which is what we call a hybrid cloud environment. In addition, many organizations use a variety of public cloud services to support different developer and business units – called a multicloud environment. Multicloud has grown in popularity because developers want access to the platform of their choice, and businesses want the flexibility to move between vendors.

The public cloud

The public cloud is a set of hardware, networking, storage, services, applications, and interfaces owned and operated by a third party for use by other companies or individuals. These commercial providers create a highly scalable data center that hides the details of the underlying infrastructure from the consumer. Public clouds are viable because they offer many options for computing, storage, and a rich set of other services. With many resources always available, public cloud consumers can quickly select, optimize, and use those resources that match the needs of the applications they will run in the public cloud. Most public cloud providers offer a wide variety of APIs and services, such as security, specialized infrastructure to support specific workloads like Graphic Processer Units (GPUs) for data science, application development pipelines, and other technologies to support customer needs. All of these cloud services are available in an on-demand manner.

Public cloud vendors are increasingly offering dedicated, non-multi-tenancy instances within their data center. In these instances, you are assigned your own machines and storage within the cloud vendor’s data center. Although the workloads are physically isolated, at some point, you will share some networking with other cloud customers. Companies that take this dedicated instance approach typically have governance, compliance, or corporate rules that don’t allow multi-tenancy. However, it is important to consider the fact that you will not have the same cost savings of a multi-tenancy approach.

The private cloud

A private cloud is a set of hardware, networking, storage, services, applications, and interfaces owned and operated by an organization for the use of its employees, partners, or customers. A private cloud can be created and managed by a third party for the exclusive use of one enterprise. The private cloud is a highly controlled environment not open for public consumption. Thus, a private cloud sits behind a firewall. The private cloud is highly automated with a focus on governance, security, and compliance. Automation replaces more manual processes of managing IT services to support customers. In this way, business rules and processes can be implemented inside software so that the environment becomes more predictable and manageable.

Increasingly, public cloud vendors are packaging their cloud services into appliances that can be installed within a customer’s on-premises data center behind the firewall. The appliance typically contains access to all of the cloud services that the cloud vendor offers on the public cloud. The consumption models for these appliance based on premises public clouds can vary — the vendor may manage and own the appliance and bill the client in the same way that they bill public cloud use, or the customer may own and maintain the appliance. This model of public cloud capabilities behind the firewall is quickly gaining traction. In these cases, businesses get the scalability, ease of use, cost model and familiarity of a cloud environment while keeping data and workloads on premises.

The hybrid and multicloud model

A hybrid cloud is a combination of a private cloud combined with the use of public cloud services where the two cloud environments work together to solve business problems. The goal is to create a hybrid cloud environment that can combine services and data from a variety of cloud models to create a unified, automated, and well-managed computing environment. In a well-orchestrated hybrid cloud environment, end-users won’t think about whether their using on premises or cloud services — it will all just be a technology service.

In addition to the hybrid cloud, multicloud is when two or more public cloud are being used within an organization. Many businesses initially found that they had a multicloud environment because different development teams or business units were choosing to use varying public clouds. As you can imagine, as businesses found themselves using multiple clouds, finance, operations, and IT teams needed a way to gain visibility, control, and choice between clouds. Therefore, multicloud management is emerging as an important consideration.

Combining multiple public services with private clouds and the data center is the definition of corporate computing. Not all companies that use some public and some private cloud services have a hybrid or multi cloud. Rather, a hybrid or multicloud environment is when multiple public and/or private services are used together to create value. In the following circumstances, a computing environment is not a hybrid or multicloud:

• If a few developers in a company use a public cloud service to prototype a new application that is completely disconnected from the private cloud or the data center, the company does not have a hybrid environment.
• If a company is using a SaaS application for a project but there is no movement of data from that application into the company’s data center, the environment is not hybrid.
• If different divisions within an enterprise are standardized on different public cloud infrastructures, but each division only utilizes and manages a single public cloud.

A cloud is hybrid or multi in the following situations:

• If a company uses a public development platform that sends data to a private cloud or a data center–based application, the cloud is hybrid.
• When a company leverages a number of SaaS applications and moves data between private or data center resources, the cloud is hybrid.
• When a business process is designed as a service so that it can connect with environments as though they were a single environment, the cloud is hybrid.
• When a SaaS analytics platform is used and data from multiple clouds sources is ingested.
• When your organization can move workloads to different public clouds based on cost or performance concerns.

Cloud Computing Elements: Resource Pools/Cloud Models and Services

Now that you have a context for the types of cloud environments, it’s important to understand the common elements required to make clouds functional. In this section, we give you the basics of what you need to know. Figure 1-1 illustrates...