require someone to physically go to a facility to install servers or plug in cables. There's no need for “remote hands” because cloud providers offer self-service management consoles that do the provisioning for you. When you think about it, cloud providers are really just providing automation-powered managed services for nearly every conceivable IT need.
In this study guide, you'll take a close look at all aspects of cloud computing as you progress on your journey to obtaining the Cloud+ certification. As an analogy to cloud computing, think of the services you get in your home through utilities, such as electricity and water services. You are probably not involved in the details of how these services are created and delivered; you turn the water faucet on and off, and pay only for what you use. Cloud computing follows the same principle, albeit applied to a variety of IT services.
Traditionally, computing did not follow this model. Instead, an organization would purchase all the hardware and software necessary to meet their needs. Adding to the cost, they needed to maintain a staff of specialized engineers to operate and maintain the systems. And they'd have to purchase more equipment than they needed to leave room for growth. This meant high capital outlays without a corresponding immediate payoff. As I mentioned earlier, organizations had to build and secure data centers to host, power, and cool the equipment.
Like utilities, cloud computing follows a pay-as-you-go model, where a provider sells computing resources that you consume as needed. This allows organizations to pay only for what they use, and it has many additional advantages that you'll explore throughout this book.
The market and adoption of the cloud computing business has exploded worldwide. In just the past decade, cloud computing has gone from a novelty for early adopters to a dominant position in the marketplace today. Although there are many statistics and measurements of the size, it is generally agreed that the market has been growing at least 15 percent annually worldwide. Current forecasts estimate the total cloud market worldwide will be more than $800 billion by the year 2025. What is clear is that the economics and business advantages of cloud computing are compelling companies to move more and more applications to the cloud, fueling additional growth well into the future.
There are many advantages to moving to the cloud, but three stand out as compelling business and operations alternatives to hosting computing resources internally in your own data center or in a colocation facility:
In the past when computing resources were initially needed, there was often a long delay of procuring, installing, and configuring all the pieces needed to host an application. With a cloud solution, the equipment is already running in a cloud provider's data center, and you can begin hosting your application in record time, sometimes as short as in a few minutes.
From a financial perspective, a company's capital expenditures can be reduced as cloud computing avoids the large up-front costs of purchasing the needed computing equipment and ongoing support expenses associated with maintaining it. Cloud computing, with its pay-as-you-go billing model, frees up a company's cash flow for other needs.
As your computing or storage needs grow, a cloud computing model can expand almost immediately. Contrast this with the data center model in which you have to procure, install, and configure new equipment or software—a process that can take days if not weeks.
In-house computing requires a data center with the computing gear needed to support the organization's operations. The organization must hire engineers to tend to the operating systems, applications, storage, and networks. As illustrated in Figure 1.1, all computing is owned and operated by a single entity.
FIGURE 1.1 In-house computing
When moving to the cloud, you outsource many of these data center operations to a cloud service provider, as shown in Figure 1.2.
FIGURE 1.2 Cloud computing model
It's important to understand that the organization's data center does not actually move into the cloud, nor does the cloud provider take over the operations of the organization's data center. Instead, the cloud provider has its own data centers that already contain all the equipment that you need to host your applications and other IT services. The cloud provider can reach economies of scale by sharing its physical IT resources with many companies. This sounds similar to a colocation facility, but there's one big exception: you do not have physical access to the cloud provider's data center. The only way that you can use their computing resources is via the management interfaces—typically web consoles or application programming interfaces (APIs)—that they provide. There's a trade-off here: you give up control of the physical IT infrastructure in exchange for the convenience of a pay-as-you-go billing model.
In the distant past, computing was the realm of large mainframe computers, with a staff of highly specialized engineers and teams of programmers and administrators to manage and run the operations. Figure 1.3 shows a typical mainframe architecture. Mainframe computing was a highly capital-intensive operation that was needed to supply computing resources to a corporation.
As computers became smaller and more powerful, the client-server architecture shown in Figure 1.4 grew prevalent, and we saw the rise in departmental computing that was distributed throughout a company's operations.
Virtualization
Virtualization is what makes cloud computing possible. Simply put, virtualization is the ability to take physical data center resources such as servers, storage, and networking and abstract them as services that can be delivered as cloud offerings. A key benefit of virtualization is that it allows different customers to share the same physical IT infrastructure. Without this ability, cloud computing wouldn't be possible.
FIGURE 1.3 Mainframe computing
FIGURE 1.4 Client-server computing
The topic of virtualization can be confusing because people use the term in wildly different ways. In its most basic interpretation, “virtual” can mean anything not purely physical—not a very helpful distinction. Hence, it helps to break virtualization down into two different categories:
Machine virtualization
Network virtualization
These distinctions aren't particularly important in the context of cloud computing, but because it's easy to apply the “virtual” moniker to anything and everything, we need to draw some boundaries around when the designation is appropriate.
