About cloud

Introduction

Needs of cloud computing

Architectures

INTRODUCTION

Cloud computing provides us a means by which we can access the applications as utilities over the Internet. It allows us to create, configure and customize application online.

With Cloud, Computing users can access database resources via the internet from anywhere for as long as they need without worrying about any maintenance or management of actual resources.

What is Cloud Computing?

• Cloud Computing is a general term used to describe a new class of network-based computing that takes place over the Internet,
  • Cloud can provide service over network, on public networks or on private networks,

WAN, LAN or VPN.

• These platforms hide the complexity and details of the underlying infrastructure from users and applications by providing a very simple graphical interface or API (Applications Programming Interface).
• In addition, the platform provides on-demand services, which are always on, anywhere, anytime and anyplace.
• Pay for use and as needed, elastic
• scale up and down in capacity and functionalities
• The hardware and software services are available to general public, enterprises, corporations and businesses markets. Example: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud.

Why the Name Cloud?

The term “Cloud” came from a network design that was used by network engineers to represent the location of various network devices and their interconnection.  The shape of this network design was like a cloud.

Why Cloud Computing?

• Cloud computing harnesses small business effectively having limited resources, it gives small businesses access to the technologies that previously were out of their reach.  Cloud computing helps small businesses to convert their maintenance cost into profit. Let’s see how?
• In an in-house IT server, you have to pay a lot of attention and ensure that there are no flaws into the system so that it runs smoothly. And in case of any technical glitch you are completely responsible; it will seek a lot of attention, time and money for repair. Whereas, in cloud computing, the service provider takes the complete responsibility of the complication and the technical faults.

Types of Clouds

There are four different cloud models that you can subscribe according to business needs:

1. Private cloud
2. Public
3. Community
4. Hybrid

Public Cloud - allows systems and services to be easily accessible to the general public; Technically there may be little or no difference between public and private cloud architecture, however, security consideration may be substantially different for services (applications, storage, and other resources) that are made available by a service provider for a public audience and when communication is effected over a non-trusted network. Generally, public cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google own and operate the infrastructure at their data center and access is generally via the Internet. AWS and Microsoft also offer direct connect services called "AWS Direct Connect" and "Azure ExpressRoute" respectively, such connections require customers to purchase or lease a private connection to a peering point offered by the cloud provider.

Private Cloud - allows systems and services to be accessible within an organization;

Community Cloud - allows systems and services to be accessible by group of organizations;

Hybrid Cloud - is a composition of two or more clouds (private, community or public) that remain distinct entities but are bound together, offering the benefits of multiple deployment models. Hybrid cloud can also mean the ability to connect collocation, managed and/or dedicated services with cloud resources.

Cloud Computing Services

The three major Cloud Computing Offerings are

• Software as a Service (SaaS)
• Platform as a Service (PaaS)
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Software as a Service (SaaS). The capability provided to the consumer is to use the provider’s applications running on a cloud infrastructure. The applications are accessible from various client devices through either a thin client interface, such as a web browser (e.g., web-based email), or a program interface. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, storage, or even individual application capabilities, with the possible exception of limited user-specific application configuration settings.

Platform as a Service (PaaS). The capability provided to the consumer is to deploy onto the cloud infrastructure consumer-created or acquired applications created using programming languages, libraries, services, and tools supported by the provider. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, or storage, but has control over the deployed applications and possibly configuration settings for the application-hosting environment.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). The capability provided to the consumer is to provision processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources where the consumer is able to deploy and run arbitrary software, which can include operating systems and applications. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure but has control over operating systems, storage, and deployed applications; and possibly limited control of select networking components (e.g., host firewalls).

Above information’s are for knowledge of Cloud structures.

Benefits of Cloud Computing

The potential for cost saving is the major reason of cloud services adoption by many organizations.  Cloud computing gives the freedom to use services as per the requirement and pay only for what you use. Due to cloud computing it has become possible to run IT operations as a outsourced unit without much in-house resources.

Following are the benefits of cloud computing:

1. Lower IT infrastructure and computer costs for users
2. Improved performance
3. Fewer Maintenance issues
4. Instant software updates
5. Improved compatibility between Operating systems
6. Backup and recovery
7. Performance and Scalability
8. Increased storage capacity
9. Increase data safety

Disadvantages of Cloud Computing

Downtime

As cloud service providers take care of a number of clients each day, they can become overwhelmed and may even come up against technical outages. This can lead to your business processes being temporarily suspended. Additionally, if your internet connection is offline, you will not be able to access any of your applications, server or data from the cloud.

Security

Although cloud service providers implement the best security standards and industry certifications, storing data and important files on external service providers always opens up risks. Using cloud-powered technologies means you need to provide your service provider with access to important business data. Meanwhile, being a public service opens up cloud service providers to security challenges on a routine basis. The ease in procuring and accessing cloud services can also give nefarious users the ability to scan, identify and exploit loopholes and vulnerabilities within a system. For instance, in a multi-tenant cloud architecture where multiple users are hosted on the same server, a hacker might try to break into the data of other users hosted and stored on the same server. However, such exploits and loopholes are not likely to surface, and the likelihood of a compromise is not great.

Vendor Lock-In

Although cloud service providers promise that the cloud will be flexible to use and integrate, switching cloud services is something that hasn’t yet completely evolved. Organizations may find it difficult to migrate their services from one vendor to another. Hosting and integrating current cloud applications on another platform may throw up interoperability and support issues. For instance, applications developed on Microsoft Development Framework (.Net) might not work properly on the Linux platform.

Limited Control

Since the cloud infrastructure is entirely owned, managed and monitored by the service provider, it transfers minimal control over to the customer. The customer can only control and manage the applications, data and services operated on top of that, not the backend infrastructure itself. Key administrative tasks such as server shell access, updating and firmware management may not be passed to the customer or end user.

As in my word cloud is an only one network platform for as which allow as to create our own custom network, server and data center at low cost. We can use latest higher-end devices and server at very low cost without investing huge amount for infrastructure. We can scale up and down anytime anywhere.

Below is the information of cloud services which are available on Azure, AWS, and Google.

AWS does offer a number of ways to help businesses quickly get up and running with common deployment scenarios; indeed, there’s often more than one way to implement a particular solution. In order to help you make sense of the AWS cloud, though, it makes sense to start from a short list of the most heavily used components.

EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) virtual servers make up the backbone of a cloud deployment on AWS. These virtual servers are available in a variety of configurations, each with differing amount of CPUs, memory, storage and network performance, and are billed based on an hourly rate. Note that some older instance types may get retired over time

S3 (Simple Storage Service) is an object storage system that can store up to 5TB in a single object, and are accessible anywhere on the Web through the requisite command line operators, API calls or even desktop apps that are designed to work with it.

EBS (Elastic Block Store) offers traditional file system capabilities and is more expensive. Attached to a server, EBS volumes function like a disk drive, and like a storage drive, persist even after a compute instance have been shut down. (Note that EC2 instances can be configured to delete EBS volumes on shutdown.)

RDS (Relationship Database Service) is a Web service that makes it easy to set up, operate and scale a relational database management system (RDBMS). An appropriate database engine can be selected, including MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL or Amazon Aurora.

Route 53 for DNS and domain name registration. Route 53 offers competitive rates that can be cheaper than the prices offered by some domain name registrars. On the other hand, Web hosting firms are also known to offer package deals that include the domain name for free, or at a cheaper rate for the first few years.

Finally, if you are looking to dabble around with the AWS cloud, you will be glad to know that AWS offers a free tier consisting of up to a year worth of compute instance time, as well as various freebies for the various products and services listed above.

Starting from a machine image and choosing a region

AWS makes it easy to launch your first compute instance by offering a wide range of prebuilt and optimized Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) that you can load onto a newly created instance. A vibrant AWS Marketplace also exists for third-party created images, and the AWS community also creates and uses shared public AMIs.

Before setting up your cloud infrastructure, you will need to choose a location or “region” from which to base your virtual infrastructure. The idea here is to go with a location that is either closest to the bulk of your users, or nearest to where your developers are physically located. For the latter, this could result in slightly better load times and speeds when uploading data and developing your website. Developers and database administrators will want to know that synchronous database replication is not supported across different regions, though asynchronous replication is. Finally, some services, especially if they’re new or beta offerings, may only be available in certain regions.

Of course, depending on how your website is architected, the use of a good Content Delivery Network (CDN) service could in most cases render your deployment region moot. You can use AWS CloudFront CDN, though other options can be used. In addition, AWS offers tools to easily migrate between multiple regions.

Finally, it’s worth noting that while the cost of most AWS service is usually the same across the different regions, it’s not always the case. See “Monitor your cost” below for further explanation of AWS cost structures.