Practical View of the Cloud - What is Cloud and What to Do With It?
IT services are expected to provide 24 hours by 7 days a week service availability. In the past, IT shops implemented powerful hardware, with redundant configuration in order to meet these “always-on” requirements. As business demand increased, IT organizations found that available data center space, power, and air-conditioning became a limiting factor in delivering “always-on” services. As a result, the market turned to virtualization solutions to reduce space, cooling and power requirements. and to better utilize the powerful hardware available in the data center.
Virtualization technology has improved availability, as virtual machines can be quickly restarted on different hardware if/when a physical server fails. Further, virtualization provides high availability for legacy applications that otherwise did not support these quick failover capabilities. Virtual machines also can be migrated in advance of system maintenance to ensure more steady availability through these transitions. Lastly, virtualization solutions provide dynamic and automatic movement of virtual machines, to better utilize hardware resources, allow snapshots, and much more.
As virtualization benefits continue to be realized, today‘s organizations are trying to leverage these solutions in as many ways as possible, including the use of "grid farms," also referred to as cloud computing (or, private cloud). We’ve given way to a new form of technology with its own intricacies and best practices. In this piece we’ll look to define exactly what "cloud computing" is.
What is the Cloud?
"Cloud computing" is a fairly new term. As shown in the graph below from Google Trends, the term "cloud computing" is becoming more popular than "virtualization." For those unfamiliar with Google Trends, it shows how frequently a given term is used in Google search engine relative to the total search volume. It also shows how frequently the term is referenced in Google News over the same period of time.
Cloud Computing vs. Virtualization
The name "cloud computing" was inspired by the cloud symbol that's often used to represent the Internet in flow charts and diagrams.
There are three basic models for cloud computing; each of these can be divided into subcategories as shown in the figure below:
- Private (Internal) cloud: internally deployed on local IT infrastructure
- Public (External) cloud: externally deployed on remote IT infrastructure
- Hybrid: combination of the two, private and public clouds
Source: Wikipedia
Diving Deeper Into Public Cloud
