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We have been using cloud for the past 30 years or so but we just didn’t call it “Cloud”. A website is a cloud service. Emails passing through “Cloud”. In simple term, “Cloud” is the “Internet” as we know it.

The term “Cloud” was used interchangeably with Internet after Microsoft decided to shift a lot of services to online. For many years we only used the internet for displaying websites and using the technology for communicating with emails. But advancement in technology made it possible to use many other services in internet. Advances as in cheaper hardware production, better connectivity of computers (broadband & fibre connection) to the internet. In addition, there has been a lot of advancement in software development which allowed developers to shift their software to the internet for a wider user.

Developing companies such as Microsoft decided to make their operating systems and Office applications available online as a rental service. As long as you had a basic computer, a browser and an internet connection, you didn’t need to buy their software or application. You could access it online and simply “rent” it. Pay for it as long as you use it and if you don’t use it, stop the payment.

After moving the operating systems and applications to internet, it was inevitable to have “network” setup in internet. As you know, network is the connection of computers and servers which belong to a particular company or individual.

Types of Cloud

It is obvious that internet has provided us with faster and much cheaper communication tools such as “Emails”. The same technology is now being used for collaboration between users, managing remote devices, running the entire company network online and much more. Generally speaking, there are three types of Cloud:

• Private Cloud: The private cloud is defined as computing services offered either over the Internet or a private internal network and only available to select users instead of the general public. Also called an internal or corporate cloud, private cloud computing gives businesses many of the benefits of a public cloud- including self-service, scalability, and elasticity - with the additional control and customization available from dedicated resources over a computing infrastructure hosted on-premises.

In addition, private clouds deliver a higher level of security and privacy through both company firewalls and internal hosting to ensure operations and sensitive data are not accessible to third-party providers. One drawback is that the company’s IT department is held responsible for the cost and accountability of managing the private cloud. So private clouds require the same staffing, management, and maintenance expenses as traditional datacentre ownership.

• Public Cloud: The public cloud is defined as computing services offered by third-party providers over the public Internet, making them available to anyone who wants to use or purchase them. They may be free or sold on-demand, allowing customers to pay only per usage for the CPU cycles, storage, or bandwidth they consume.

Unlike private clouds, public clouds can save companies from the expensive costs of having to purchase, manage, and maintain on-premises hardware and application infrastructure - the cloud service provider is held responsible for all management and maintenance of the systems. Public clouds can also be deployed faster than on-premises infrastructures and with an almost infinitely scalable platform.

• Hybrid Cloud: It is IT infrastructure that connects a public cloud to a private cloud, and provides orchestration, management and application portability between them to create a single, flexible, optimal cloud environment for running a company’s computing workloads

Hybrid cloud is the combination of private & public cloud allowing data and applications to be shared between them.

Who provide private & public cloud?

Physical Cloud vs Virtual Cloud

Physical cloud refers to the in-house physical infrastructure used to create the cloud environment. Virtual Cloud on the other hand refers to the same arrangement but in cloud without having actual physical hardware. As a matter of fact, Virtual cloud infrastructure also uses physical hardware but you don’t own it. You only pay to use it as long as you use it.

What is Virtualisation in computing?

Virtualization uses software to create an abstraction layer over computer hardware that allows the hardware elements of a single computer—processors, memory, storage and more—to be divided into multiple virtual computers, commonly called virtual machines (VMs). Each VM runs its own operating system (OS) and behaves like an independent computer, even though it is running on just a portion of the actual underlying computer hardware.

It follows that virtualization enables more efficient utilization of physical computer hardware and allows a greater return on an organization’s hardware investment.

Today, virtualization is a standard practice in enterprise IT architecture. It is also the technology that drives cloud computing economics. Virtualization enables cloud providers to serve users with their existing physical computer hardware; it enables cloud users to purchase only the computing resources they need when they need it, and to scale those resources cost-effectively as their workloads grow.

To create a virtual environment, we need a server with no software. The only software we need to install is called “Hypervisor”. There are three main Hypervisors to name, they are Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware vSphere, and Citrix Hypervisor. There are other less well known Hypervisor that we don’t mention here.

Hypervisor takes ownership of the entire physical server by dividing the memory, CPU power, hard disk space and allows us to create several virtual computer on a single server. Hypervisor is able to assign a portion of resources to each Virtual Machine (VM). These VMs are completely independent of each other and each can have its own operating system and software installed on. In case of a trojan attack or virus attack, only the VM that has received the attach will be affected. The advantage of VM is that it can be rebuilt in a matter of minutes and not hours. Hence the down time is minimal.

The depiction in figure 2 is called Type 1 virtualisation. There is Type 2 where Hypervisor is indeed an application running on the top of Host operating system. This type is used for small environment and we don’t go through it here.

What elements of IT Infostructure can be virtualised?

Almost everything, take a look at the list below:

What other terms being used in Cloud environment?

SaaS :

Software as a Service - Allows users to connect to and use cloud-based apps over the Internet. Common examples are email, calendaring, and office tools (such as Microsoft Office 365). SaaS provides a complete software solution that you purchase on a pay-as-you-go basis from a cloud service provider such as us. You rent the use of an app for your organization, and your users connect to it over the Internet, usually with a web browser. 

PaaS:

Platform as a Service - Is a complete development and deployment environment in the cloud, with resources that enable you to deliver everything from simple cloud-based apps to sophisticated, cloud-enabled enterprise applications. You purchase the resources you need from a cloud service provider on a pay-as-you-go basis and access them over a secure Internet connection. PaaS includes infrastructure—servers, storage, and networking—but also middleware, development tools, business intelligence (BI) services, database management systems, and more. PaaS is designed to support the complete web application lifecycle: building, testing, deploying, managing, and updating.

IaaS

Infrastructure as a Service - Is a type of cloud computing service that offers essential compute, storage, and networking resources on demand, on a pay-as-you-go basis. IaaS is one of the four types of cloud services, along with software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and serverless. Migrating your organization's infrastructure to an IaaS solution helps you reduce maintenance of on-premises data centres, save money on hardware costs, and gain real-time business insights. IaaS solutions give you the flexibility to scale your IT resources up and down with demand. They also help you quickly provision new applications and increase the reliability of your underlying infrastructure.

As you see from this blog post, there are lots of complexities come with cloud services. Cloud was invented to make your life easier but not that of IT engineers. If you use cloud, you will be better of to get help from people who know how to help you. Visit our video for support here:  https://www.globalhostcentre.com/support