The Cloud
Table of Contents
What is The Cloud?
You've probably been hearing people talk about the cloud more and more. There are public clouds and private clouds and hybrid clouds and rain clouds but not really relevant here. There are cloud clients and cloud storage and cloud servers too. You might hear the cloud mentioned in newspaper headlines and TV advertisements. The cloud is the future, so we're told, and IT support specialists really need to keep up on the latest innovations in tech in order to support them. But what exactly is the cloud? The truth is the cloud isn't a single technology or invention or anything tangible at all. It's just a concept, and to throw in another cloud joke, a pretty nebulous one at that. The fact that the term 'the cloud' has been applied to something so difficult to define is pretty fitting.
Basically,
Cloud Computing is a technological approach where computing resources are provisioned in a shareable way so that lots of users get what they need when they need it.
It's an approach that leans heavily on the idea that companies provide services for each other using these shared resources. At the heart of cloud computing is a technology known as hardware virtualization. Hardware virtualization is a core concept of how cloud computing technologies work. It allows the concept of a physical machine and a logical machine to be abstracted away from each other.
With virtualization,
A single physical machine called a host could run many individual virtual instances called guests.
An operating system expects to be able to communicate with the underlying hardware in certain ways. Hardware virtualization platforms employ what's called a hypervisor.
A hypervisor is a piece of software that runs and manages virtual machines while also offering these guests a virtual operating platform that's indistinguishable from actual hardware.
With virtualization, a single physical computer can act as the host for many independent virtual instances. They each run their own independent operating system and, in many ways, are indistinguishable from the same operating systems running on physical hardware.
The cloud takes this concept one step further. If you build a huge cluster of interconnected machines that can all function as hosts for lots of virtual guests, you've got a system that lets you share resources among all of those instances. Let's try explaining this in a more practical way. Let's say you have the need for four servers.
First, you need an email server. You've carefully analyzed things and expect this machine will need eight gigs of RAM to function properly.
Next, you need a name server. The name server barely needs any resources since it doesn't have to perform anything really computational. But, you can't run it on the same physical machine as your email server since your email server needs to run on Windows, and your name server needs to run on Linux.
Now, the smallest server configuration your hardware vendor sells is a machine with eight gigabytes of RAM. So you have to buy another one with those specifications.
Finally, you have a financial database. This database is normally pretty quiet and doesn't need too many resources during normal operations. But for your end of month billing processes to complete in a timely manner, you determine the machine would need 32 gigabytes of RAM. It has to run on a special version of Linux designed just for the database so the name server can also run on this machine. So you order a server with that much RAM and then a second with the same specifications to act as a backup. In order to run your business this way, you have to purchase four machines with a grand total of 80 gigabytes of RAM. That seems pretty outrageous since it's likely that only 40 gigabytes of this total RAM will ever be used at one time.
Most of the month you're using much less. That's a lot of money spent on resources you're either never going to use or rarely use. So let's forget about that model.
Instead, let's imagine a huge collection of interconnected servers that can host virtualized servers. These virtual instances running on this collection of servers can be given access to the underlying RAM as they need it. Under this model, the company that runs the collection of servers can charge you to host virtual instances of your servers instead of you buying the four physical machines. And it could cost much less than what you'd spend on the four physical servers.
The benefits of the cloud are obvious. But let's take it a step further. The cloud computing company that can host your virtualized instances also offer dozens of other services. So instead of worrying about setting up your own backup solution, you can just employ theirs. It's easy. And if you need a load balancer, you can just use their solution. Plus, if any underlying hardware breaks, they just move your virtual instance to another machine without you even noticing. To top it all off, since these are all virtual servers and services, you don't have to wait for the physical hardware you ordered to show up. You just need to click a few buttons in a web browser. That's a pretty good deal.
In our analogy, we used an example of what a public cloud is,
A large cluster of machines run by another company.
A private cloud takes the same concepts, but instead,
it's entirely used by a single large corporation and generally physically hosted on its own premises.
Another term you might run into, a hybrid cloud, isn't really a separate concept.
It's just a term used to describe situations where companies might run things like their most sensitive proprietary technologies on a private cloud while entrusting their less sensitive servers to a public cloud.
Those are the basics of what the cloud is.
It's a new model in computing where large clusters of machines let us use the total resources available in a better way.
The cloud lets you provision a new server in a matter of moments and leverage lots of existing services instead of having to build your own. To sum up, its blue skies ahead for anyone using their cloud.
Everything as a Service
In our last session, we gave you a basic definition of what cloud computing is, but the term has really come to mean so much more than just hosting virtual machines. Another term that's been used more and more with the rise of cloud computing is X as a service. Here, the X can stand for lots of different things. The way we've described the cloud so far would probably best be defined as infrastructure as a service or IaaS.
The idea behind infrastructure as a service is that you shouldn't have to worry about building your own network or your own servers. You just pay someone else to provide you with that service.
Recently, we've seen the definition of the cloud expand well beyond infrastructure as a service. The most common of these are platform as a service, or PaaS, and software as a service, or SaaS.
Platform as a Service
Platform as a service is a subset of cloud computing where a platform is provided for customers to run their services.
This basically means that an execution engine is provided for whatever software someone wants to run. A web developer writing a new application doesn't really need an entire server complete with a complex file system, dedicated resources, and all these other things. It doesn't matter if this server is virtual or not. They really just need an environment that their web app can run in. That is what platform as a service provides.
Software as a Service
Software as a service takes this one step further. Infrastructure as a service abstracts away the physical infrastructure you need and platform as a service abstracts away the server instances you need.
Software as a service is essentially a way of licensing the use of software to others while keeping that software centrally hosted and managed.
Software as a service has become really popular for certain things. A great example is e-mail. Offerings like Gmail for Business from Google or Office 365 Outlook from Microsoft are really good examples of software as a service. Using one of those services means you're trusting Google or Microsoft to handle just about everything about your email service. Software as a service is a model that's gaining a ton of traction. Web browsers have become so feature packed that lots of things that required standalone software in the past can now run well inside of a browser. And if you can run something in a browser, it's a prime candidate for SaaS. Today, you can find everything from word processors to graphic design programs to human resource management solutions offered under a subscription based SaaS model. More and more, the point of a business' network is just to provide an internet connection to access different software or data in the cloud.
Cloud Storage
Another popular way to use cloud technologies, is cloud storage.
In a cloud storage system, a customer contracts a cloud storage provider to keep their data secure, accessible, and available.
This data could be anything from individual documents to large database backups. There are lots of benefits of cloud storage over a traditional storage mechanism. Without cloud storage, there's the general headache of managing a storage array. Hard drives are one of the most frequent components that may experience a malfunction in a computer system. That means that you'd have to carefully monitor the devices being used for storage and replace parts when needed. By using a cloud storage solution, it's up to the provider to keep the underlying physical hardware running. Also, cloud storage providers usually operate in lots of different geographic regions. This let's you easily duplicate your data across multiple sites. Many of these providers are even global in scale which lets you make your data more readily available for users all over the world. This also provides protection against data loss, since if one region of storage experience has problems, you can probably still access your data in a different region.
Cloud storage solutions also grow with you. Typically, you'll pay for exactly how much storage you're using instead of having a fixed amount like you would with local storage. While this doesn't always mean that cloud storage is necessarily a cheaper option, it does mean that you can better manage what your expenses for storage actually are. Not only is cloud storage useful for replacing large scale local storage arrays, it's also a good solution for backing up smaller bits of data. Your smartphone might automatically upload every picture you take to a cloud storage solution. If your phone dies, you lose it, or accidentally delete pictures, they're still there waiting for you in the cloud.
Reference:
https://www.coursera.org/learn/computer-networking/lecture/TXgpc/what-is-the-cloud
https://www.coursera.org/learn/computer-networking/lecture/3j4pu/everything-as-a-service
https://www.coursera.org/learn/computer-networking/lecture/yupAJ/cloud-storage
