Cloud Computing Platforms
Tags: cloud, softwaredevelopment, aws, gcp
Published: 2024-06-17 16:40:01

## Introduction

When moving to the cloud, we can use the services one of many CSPs offers. we can only choose the service optimal for our use case if we know what services are available. 

Interapobaility has become increasingly important in today's inter-connected world, it is common for organizations to use multi-cloud strategies integrating cloud services by several cloud providers or with existing on-premise infrastructure.

Furthermore, to prevent vendor lock-in, we should be aware of the various offerings by competing cloud providers to stay flexible. There are many more reasons why we should learn what the different providers offer such as security and compliance, innovation and new services, ecosystem integration, performance optimization, scalability and flexibility, technical support, etc.
Here we will discuss some of the most frequently used services offered by the big three cloud providers to enable us to choose what is best for our situation. This applies to everyone using the cloud including data scientists, cloud architects and consultants, cloud developers and engineers and so many more.


## Terminologies Defined

**Cloud Platform:** An abstraction layer that can be used to provision resources and as a starting point for cloud development.

**Cloud service provider:** A corporation running many data centers worldwide and offering services based on this service for rent.

There are many CSPs but three of them, due to their considerable market share are the most popular.


## Amazon web services


It started in 2006, is one of the oldest CSPs, and has the biggest market share. Compute services include:

- Elastic compute cloud(EC2)
- Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
- Simple Storage Service (S3)
- Relational Database Service(RDS)
- Lambda
- Kinesis
- Elastic Map Reduce EMR

Others include:

- Route 53, 
- Simple Notification Service(SQS), 
- Elastic Load Balancer
- Network firewall.



## Data security and protection

Considering some thoughts into which availability zone should be used to deploy a resource can contribute to data protection. Moreso, data being redundant in many zones can mitigate data loss and support data failover. 

On the other hand, limiting the 
geographical location to which data can be stored and processed can ensure that this falls under one jurisdiction or another.

As far as monitoring control and encryption services are concerned, there are:

- CloudTrail, Macie, CLoudHSM, Key Management service(KMS), cloud Tower

- GuardDuty, Nitro system

- ISO compliance for cloud security, privacy information management, and cloud privacy.

- VPC

## Pricing and costs

Most services are offered on a pay-as-you-go basis.

There are 12 months when we can try services and some services are free.


## Certifications

They run certification programs to become associates and then professionals.



## Microsoft Azure
 

It started as the Windows Azure platform in 2010 then became Microsoft Azure in 2014. The virtual machines in Azure are called virtual machines and its services include:

- Virtual machine
- Kubernetes services
- Container Instance
- Blob storage: Used for object storage
- Azure SQL: cloud version of Microsoft SQL Server, a relational database.
- Azure Functions: the serverless compute service here is called Azure Functions.
- DNS, notification hubs, load balancer, and firewall: 
- Azure machine learning: provides abstraction for data connection
- Azure Databricks for big data processing
- HDInsight
- Data Factory


## Data security and protection

Azure has ways of ensuring security and protection. 
They include:

- Access management in Azure Active Directory: 
- Data Encryption at rest and in transit
- Virtual Private Network(VPN, VNet)
- Security center


## Pricing and Costs

Some services are free and it is for 12v months, pay as you go. You can also save costs by making long-term commitments and using either resource.


## Certifications

There are certifications to become experts from associates to professionals.



## Google Cloud Platform

It started in 2011 with the cloud computing engine which is Google Virtual Machines.
Its services include:


- Cloud VPC: Virtual private cloud services
- App Engine
- Kubernetes Engine: containers as a service
- Compute engine
- BigQuery
- Dataflow
- Pub/Sub
- Cloud storage: This is Google object storage
- Cloud Spanner: A distributed relational database service providing transactional consistency
- Cloud Functions: Google serverless computing service 
- Cloud DNS, Cloud Pub/Sub, cloud load balancing



## Data security and protection

They use various ways to ensure security like:

- Encryption at rest and in transit
- ISO standards for cloud security, privacy, and regulatory compliance.
- VPC - virtual private cloud
- Security command center
- Identity and access management
- Firewalls


## Pricing and costs

Similar to the other providers, 12 months and pay as you go. There are also free tier offerings.



The largest cloud players are: 
- AWS
- Azure
- Google
- Alibaba Cloud
- IBM
- Salesforce


## Gartner Magic Quadrant

It divides the market into Challengers, Leaders, Niche Players, Visionaries

- Leaders: AWS, Azure, Google
- Niche players: IBM
- Visionaries: Alibaba cloud


## Criteria to consider when choosing a suitable cloud provider

- Company strategy
- Regulatory Compliance
- Regional presence
- Technologies and service roadmap
- Performance and reliability
- Availability and SLA
- Billing models and costs
- Flexibility
- Support



## Cloud reference architectures

- Azure architectures
- AWS reference architecture
- Google Cloud reference architecture


Note: This is a 4-fold series on cloud computing, virtualization, containerization, and data processing.
Check the remaining 3 articles on my blog.

This is the third. Here is the link to the second.

https://dev.to/michellebuchiokonicha/virtualization-containerization-with-docker-storage-and-network-services-2bjf/edit
it focuses on docker, containerization, virtualization, storage technologies, and network services.

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