Fundamentals of Cloud Computing
By: Sudeepa Shiranthaka
Tags: Writing, Microsoft, Azure, Médium, Cloud Computing

People often get confused due to the ambiguity surrounding the term Cloud Computing. Here In this article, I am referring to actual computing solutions that are used by organizations, companies, or even individuals. Microsoft Azure (previously known as Windows Azure) is Microsoft’s public cloud computing platform. It offers a wide range of cloud services, including compute, analytics, storage, networking, and more.

When you first start learning a new subject in Information Technology (IT), you’ll usually begin by studying the underlying concepts (that is, the theory). You will then familiarize yourself with the architecture, and sooner or later you’ll start playing around and getting hands-on to see how it works in practice.

In this article, I am covering the following contents about Cloud Computing.

Content

What is Cloud Computing?

Key Fundamentals of Cloud Computing

- Virtualization

- Software-Defined Datacenter (SDDC)

- Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)

- Cloud Services

- Cloud Types

Top benefits of cloud computing

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services- including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence-over the Internet (“the cloud”) to offer faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale. You typically pay only for cloud services you use, helping you lower your operating costs, run your infrastructure more efficiently, and scale as your business needs change.-azure.microsoft.com/

Which is on-demand access via the internet, to the use of computing resources — software applications, servers (physical server and virtual servers), storage data, development tools, networking capabilities, etc. (or CSP). The CSP (Cloud Solution Provider) makes these resources available for or charges a monthly subscription fee.

Key Fundamentals of Cloud Computing

Virtualization

Software-Defined Datacenter (SDDC)

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)

Cloud Services

Cloud Types

Virtualization

In computing, virtualization refers to the creation of a virtual form of a device or a resource, such as a server, storage device, network, or even an operating system. Nowadays, virtualization has evolved into container-based virtualization. Virtual machines have their own operating system, which is virtualized on top of a physical server; on the other hand, containers on one machine (either physical or virtual) all share the same underlying operating system.

The history of virtualization goes to the late 90s, the concept of virtualization came into the picture when IBM developed its time-sharing solutions in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Benefits of Virtualization

Resource efficiency: Before virtualization, each application server required its own dedicated physical CPU — IT staff would purchase and configure a separate server for each application they wanted to run. (IT preferred one application and one operating system (OS) per computer for reliability reasons.) Invariably, each physical server would be underused. In contrast, server virtualization lets you run several applications — each on its own VM with its own OS- on a single physical computer (typically an x86 server) without sacrificing reliability. This enables maximum utilization of the physical hardware’s computing capacity.

Easier management: Replacing physical computers with software-defined VMs makes it easier to use and manage policies written in software. This allows you to create automated IT service management workflows. For example, automated deployment and configuration tools enable administrators to define collections of virtual machines and applications as services, in software templates. This means that they can install those services repeatedly and consistently without cumbersome, time-consuming. and error-prone manual setup. Admins can use virtualization security policies to mandate certain security configurations based on the role of the virtual machine. Policies can even increase resource efficiency by retiring unused virtual machines to save on space and computing power.

Minimal downtime: OS and application crashes can cause downtime and disrupt user productivity. Admins can run multiple redundant virtual machines alongside each other and failover between them when problems arise. Running multiple redundant physical servers is more expensive.

Faster provisioning: Buying, installing, and configuring hardware for each application is time-consuming. Provided that the hardware is already in place, provisioning virtual machines to run all your applications is significantly faster. You can even automate it using management software and build it into existing workflows.

Software-Defined Datacenter (SDDC)

Techopedia defines an SDDC as “a type of data repository [where] all data center resources and services are provisioned, monitored and managed through software-based techniques and processes.”

If infrastructure resources are pooled, management resources are standardized and policy-driven provisioning is enabled, SDDCs can help IT groups react with increased speed to new IT resource requests. At the same time, an SDDC provides IT groups, with control oversupply, cost-cutting, and application modernization.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)

IBM defines an SOA, or service-oriented architecture as “a way to make software components reusable via service interfaces. These interfaces utilize common communication standards in such a way that they can be rapidly incorporated into new applications without having to perform deep integration each time”.

SOA gives several benefits such as,

Greater business agility; faster time to market

The efficiency of assembling applications from reused service interfaces allows developers to create applications much faster in response to new business opportunities than rewriting and reintegrating them into each new development project.

Ability to leverage legacy functionality in new markets.

A well-conformed SOA allows developers to easily ‘lock’ features on a computer platform or environment and to extend them to new environments and markets. Many firms used SOA, for example, to expose the features of mainframe financial systems on the Internet so that their customers can only use previously accessible processes and information through direct contact with their employees or business partners.

Improved collaboration between business and IT

In an SOA, services can be defined in business terms (for example, “generate insurance quote”). This allows company analysts to work with developers more effectively on important insights — such as the extent of a business process defined as a service or the impact of a process change to achieve a better outcome.

Every service can be replaced by another service.

Cloud Services

A cloud service is any service available to organizations, companies, or users provided by a cloud solution or computing provider such as Microsoft Azure. Cloud services are appropriate if you want to provide a service that:

Is highly available via self-service.

Can be managed via self-service.

Has scalability, which enables a user to scale up (making the hardware stronger) or scale-out (adding additional nodes).

Offers rapid deployment.

Can be fully automated and orchestrated.

Cloud technology is about the delivery of a service via the internet, in order to given organization access to resources such as software, storage, network, and other types of It infrastructure and components.

The cloud can offer you many service types. Here are the most important ones.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) — A platform to host your virtual machines. Virtual machines deployed in Azure are a good example of this. This provides a hardware platform as a service.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) — A platform to develop, build, and run your applications, without the complexity of building and running your own infrastructure. For example, there is Azure App service, where you can push your code and azure will host the infrastructure for you.

Software as a Service (SaaS) — ready-to-go applications, running in the cloud, such as office 365. This means it provides end-users standardized, network-delivered IT applications.

Cloud Types

Cloud services can be classified based on their locations or based on the platform the service is hosted on. In the above section, I have mentioned cloud can be classified according to the platform such as IaaS, PaaS, SaaS. And also, we can classify clouds based on locations as,

Public Cloud

All the services are hosted by a service provider. Microsoft’s Azure is an implementation of this type.

Private Cloud

Your own cloud in your data center. Microsoft recently developed a special version of Azure for this (Azure Stack)

Hybrid Cloud

A combination of public and private cloud. One example is combining the power of Azure and Azure Stack.

Community Cloud

A community cloud is where multiple organizations work on the same shared platform, provided that they have similar objectives or goals.

Top benefits of cloud computing

Costs

Cloud computing eliminates the capital expense of buying hardware and software and setting up and running on-site datacenters — the racks of servers, the round-the-clock electricity for power and cooling, and the IT experts for managing the infrastructure. It adds up fast.

Speed

The majority of cloud computing services are supplied with self-service and on-demand, so even a vast array of computing resources can be provided in minutes, usually with just a click of the mouse.

Performance

The biggest cloud computing services run on a worldwide network of secure data centers, which are regularly upgraded to the latest generation of fast and efficient computing hardware. This offers several benefits over a single corporate datacenter, including reduced network latency for applications and greater economies of scale.

Global Scale

The benefits of cloud computing services include the ability to scale elastically. In cloud speak, that means delivering the right amount of IT resources — for example, more or less computing power, storage, bandwidth — right when they’re needed, and from the right geographic location.

So, We reached the end of the article. Hope you enjoy and learn something about Cloud Computing. Let’s meet with another article. Goodbye👋 and stay safe😃.