Cloud Questions

Cloud Quick Summary

Types of clouds

There are 4 types of cloud:

+ Private Cloud: cloud that is dedicated solely to one organization. Advantages of Private Clouds are high security, Regulatory compliance, Flexibility to respond to changing needs. Drawbacks of private cloud are cost, mobile difficulty,
+ Public Cloud: cloud that is delivered via the Internet and shared across organizations. Examples of public clouds are Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Advantages of public cloud are lower costs, Freedom from maintenance. Drawbacks of public cloud are Lack of security, minimal technical control
+ Hyrid Cloud: any environment that uses both public and private clouds. Confidential operations like financial reporting, for example, can be run on a private cloud. High-volume, less sensitive workloads like web-based email – or even temporary workloads such as development and test – can run on a public cloud.
+ Community Cloud: a recent variation on the private cloud model that can be only accessible by group of organizations. It shares the infrastructure between several organizations from a specific community. It may be managed internally by organizations or by the third-party.

Cloud services

There are 3 main types of as-a-Service solutions: SaaS, PaaS and IaaS

+ SaaS (Software as a Service): SaaS uses the web to deliver applications that are managed by a third-party vendor and whose interface is accessed on the clients’ side. Most SaaS applications can be run directly from a web browser without any downloads or installations required, although some require plugins.
+ PaaS (Platform as a Service): are used for applications, and other development, while providing cloud components to software. What developers gain with PaaS is a framework they can build upon to develop or customize applications. PaaS makes the development, testing, and deployment of applications quick, simple, and cost-effective. With this technology, enterprise operations, or a third-party provider, can manage OSes, virtualization, servers, storage, networking, and the PaaS software itself. Developers, however, manage the applications. PaaS provides everything except applications.
+ IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service): self-service models for accessing, monitoring, and managing remote datacenter infrastructures, such as compute (virtualized or bare metal), storage, networking, and networking services (e.g. firewalls). Instead of having to purchase hardware outright, users can purchase IaaS based on consumption, similar to electricity or other utility billing.