Cloud Computing

Cloud agility is the ability to rapidly change an IT infrastructure to adapt to the evolving needs of the business. For example, if your service peaks one month, you can scale to demand and pay a larger bill for the month. If the following month the demand drops, you can reduce the used resources and be charged less. This agility lets you manage your costs dynamically, optimising spending as requirements change.

Cloud computing is flexible and gives you the ability to choose how you want to deploy it. The cloud deployment model you choose depends on your budget, and on your security, scalability, and maintenance needs. There are:

Public

A common use case scenario is deploying a web application or a blog site on hardware and resources that are owned by a cloud provider. Using a public cloud in this scenario allows cloud users to get their website or blog up quickly, and then focus on maintaining the site without having to worry about purchasing, managing or maintaining the hardware on which it runs.

Private

A use case scenario for a private cloud would be when an organisation has data that cannot be put in the public cloud, perhaps for legal reasons. An example scenario may be where government policy requires specific data to be kept in-country or privately. A private cloud can provide cloud functionality to external customers as well, or to specific internal departments such as Accounting or Human Resources.

Hybrid (Combi of both public and private)

This is helpful when you have some things that cannot be put in the cloud, maybe for legal reasons. For example, you may have some specific pieces of data that cannot be exposed publicly (such as medical data) which needs to be held in your private datacenter. Another example is one or more applications that run on old hardware that can’t be updated. In this case, you can keep the old system running locally, and connect it to the public cloud for authorization or storage.

Type of cloud computing

1. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)

Infrastructure as a Service is the most flexible category of cloud services. It aims to give you the most control over the provided hardware that runs your application (IT infrastructure servers and virtual machines (VMs), storage, and operating systems). Instead of buying hardware, with IaaS, you rent it. It’s an instant computing infrastructure, provisioned and managed over the internet.

2. Platform as a service (PaaS)

PaaS provides an environment for building, testing, and deploying software applications. The goal of PaaS is to help you create an application quickly without managing the underlying infrastructure. For example, when deploying a web application using PaaS, you don’t have to install an operating system, web server, or even system updates.

3. Software as a service (SaaS)

SaaS is software that is centrally hosted and managed for the end customer. It is usually based on an architecture where one version of the application is used for all customers, and licensed through a monthly or annual subscription. Office 365, Skype, and Dynamics CRM Online are perfect examples of SaaS software.

Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform. Azure provides over 100 services that enable you to do everything from running your existing applications on virtual machines to exploring new software paradigms such as intelligent bots and mixed reality.

Here are just a few kinds of services you’ll find on Azure:

• Compute services such as VMs and containers that can run your applications
• Database services that provide both relational and NoSQL choices
• Identity services that help you authenticate and protect your users
• Networking services that connect your datacenter to the cloud, provide high availability or host your DNS domain
• Storage solutions that can accommodate massive amounts of both structured and unstructured data
• AI and machine-learning services can analyze data, text, images, comprehend speech, and make predictions using data — changing the world of agriculture, healthcare, and much more.
• And many more!

Cloud Computing: IT infrastructure management isn’t just about on-premises equipment anymore. IT infrastructure training programs must also cover the various use cases for public, private, and hybrid cloud technology.

Digital resources:

1. https://learning.linkedin.com/content-library/online-technical-courses/cloud-computing-training
2. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/

By the time I graduated, this information might be out-of-date, learning IT is not only information and gained insights, but also, resilience to keep on learning.
Novia A.P