What is Cloud computing? Do I need to migrate to the cloud?
Cloud computing is the ocean of technology together to give us a nice flavor of hosting solutions in the cloud over the past 10 years. Previously cloud computing is not been into the active market. But it made the evolution of the technology market, changed the technology and world economy to make it more reliable, faster, secure, and scalable.
What is the concept behind cloud computing?
Virtualization is the term, where you can virtually create your operating system, network resources, servers, storage, etc… virtualization shares the hardware into the different OS, servers utilization, and applications. Location is no longer constrained on the hosting. In the cloud computing ownership of the physical hardware, it belongs to a single organization.
when you planned to migrate to the cloud, you should know what type of computing you're going to implement for you/client solution. Because, If I planned to migrate to the cloud, I user be in one of the categories like,
If you completely don’t have a clue, whether my business required cloud hosting or not. Just read the below point, if your problem is matching with them, Your the right candidate to plan to move on cloud hosting.
1. I owned and setup the infrastructure on hosting, but it is killing on costing,
2. I don’t want to spend a lot of time choosing my server and hardware to it. Need a more flexible and reliable solution.
3. Absolutely no idea about my website traffic, unable to predict it (every alternate week in month traffic goes high)
4. I have an application, where I will receive millions of records per second. I need reliable and scalable storage.
5. I want to improve my business with support of AI and Bot support.
6. I am planning to start a website, I don’t know what is hosting. From where I can start? How can I host my website?
7. In future, I may want to expand the business without any further capital expenditure.
8. I need to monitor all the applications in one place, at the same time need further support to improve my hosting environment (100% uptime)
Cloud hosting is not a limited solution, it is an ocean for hosting and dependence needs. Let me walk you through major categories on elements.
If you look at the above picture, you will be able to easily correlate the hosting of the server in on-premises Vs cloud hosting. The traditional hosting solution is when you owned the servers, storage, networking, OS, etc… I would say, it has a high risk on our side. When it comes to security, cost expenses, manpower involvement. Everything you need to keep tracking and more effort to maintain a data center as well as infrastructure.
Infrastructure as a service (Iaas) is one of the cloud categories you will be benefited from managing the hardware and physical server. Everything they will be providing you not in the physical form, it is virtual form. You can use them and pay-as-you-go. These are the components cloud hosting will be provided like a virtual machine, storage, and networking (However, it is not free :-). But not upfront, you have to pay based on your usage). There are certain types of hosting virtual machines itself like VM, Container, and Serverless computing. Your job will be more scoped on only configuring on your VM, deploying your application, and DB, start using it. Responsibility between cloud hosting provider Vs User (30/70)
Platform as a service (Paas) is another solution, where you can host only applications not to worry about underlying infrastructure like virtual machines and storage. You can just deploy and start using it. Responsibility between cloud hosting provider Vs User (50/50). Example: Application website hosting
Software as a service (Saas) will have only control over to your application, there is no relation to underlying infrastructure/code. Purely your job will be configuring the software to work on top of it. Responsibility between cloud hosting provider Vs User (80/20). Example: SAP, MS Office, etc…
Let's look into cloud computing concepts and value adds to our daily business, Few about the advantages of it.
- Pay-as-you-go model — No need to spend money on upfront.
- Elasticity — Ability to shrink and expand the resource (Depends on traffic to the site, without manual intervention)
- Reliability — Trustworthy Agreements and SLA
- High Availability — Keep your website live on 99.9%
- Scalability — Ability to scale-in and scale-out your application instance
- Disaster Recovery — the ability to quickly recover and retain maximum grantee data.
- Security — It has the ability of different level of security including MFA (Multi-factor authentication)
- Uptime (99.9% SLA, It is subject to change by plan)
- Hybrid Approach for your on-premises account.
- Storage highly reliable with different providers and techniques like NoSQL, RDBMS and IoT data’s
The cloud service is available for all customers with different solutions like Private cloud, Public cloud, and Hybrid cloud.
A private cloud will more opt for the customer, who has a large number of companies under their group. They like to keep everything under the cloud, not on the public network. In that case, he is the best customer for the private cloud model. Another easy example of a private cloud is cloud resellers like ACQUIA, Pantheon, and Platform.sh. Generally, the private cloud will be supporting 2 financial models of payments. Either you can pay-as-you-go or You can invest based on your infrastructure (Capital Expenditure Or Optimal Expenditure)
Public cloud is the easy way subscription on a pay-as-you-go model, doesn’t need to pay anything at the time of subscription. Only you may need to enter your valid credit card details. Based on your usage, the money will be detected either monthly or yearly.
Hybrid cloud is another popular model for the company that has the infrastructure already and using them but still, they like to migrate the new enhancement servers and storage into cloud.
When I think as a user, How it is possible to get all the features in one place, but price on budget. It is a real fact or some hidden business tricks to make a money :-)
Hosting companies are invested billions of money to build the infrastructure, security, and manpower to keep the cloud computing infrastructure safer and reliable.
Maybe a realtime scenario comparison is in the restaurant with cloud providers. When he/she cook for the 3/4 person at home, they purchase the ingredients and veg/non-veg for retail price. But when the same person cooks for a restaurant, they purchase everything in wholesale price. Because you're going to cook for more than 100’s. Obviously materials need also will be huge. So you have to buy the veg/non-veg for wholesale, otherwise, they will not make a good Briyani. In the same scenario on cloud computing, since investing a lot of money, they will be purchasing every infrastructure materials including server room locks as wholesale prices. So when they sell the cloud space to the customer, they are charging for the usage price.
The front runner of cloud providers in the market
In the cloud computing market, there are 100’s of cloud providers are servicing. But the front runner of the race if AWS, Microsoft Azure, and GCP (Google Cloud Provider). The above image states the revenue of each organization in 2019. This report is being released by leading cloud reporting companies called the Rightscale.
I hope everyone enjoyed my post. Please share your thoughts with my email. Thanks for reading my post. Catch you soon with another interesting topic.
