Cloud Deployment & Services Delivery Concepts
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Three Primary Models of Deployment
- Public Cloud
- Private Cloud
- Hybrid Cloud
- What's Cloud Service Delivery Model?
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
- Platform as a Service (PaaS)
- Software as a Service (SaaS)
- Summary
- References
Introduction
Within your organization deploying to cloud services, you must consider the deployment model for your organization. There are some factors needed to be reconsideration when deciding. It depends on your organization's industry, compliance, regulations, and of course, the cost.
Another thing for our organization is understanding the cloud service delivery models to choose the best cloud services suited to our organization's needs.
In this article, we'll discuss the models and service delivery models. OK, let's get started then.
Three Primary Models of Deployment
- Public cloud
- Private cloud
- Hybrid cloud
Public Cloud
This cloud deployment could easily be defined as a deployment model in which a business consumes IT services from third-party vendors, such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, over the Internet.
These public cloud providers, such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and others, deliver and provide IT services across all industries and for all different business types and sizes.
It is generally paid for as a pay-as-you-go model, which can help your organization move from a CAPEX mode of investment in IT to an OPEX mode. Moreover, this gives an advantage to your organization by freeing up the capital for more critical investment opportunities.
Note: CAPEX (Capital Expenditure) is an organization's cost to acquire assets that provide benefits beyond the current year. At the same time, OPEX (Operating Expense) is the organization's money spent to run daily operations.
Public cloud vendors' offers include complimentary free services, subscription-based or on-demand pay-as-you-go. Pay-as-you-go, your organization is charged based on how much it consumes. Moreover, public cloud vendors can offer more excellent stability and agility that would otherwise have been too expensive. Furthermore, customers are offered a self-service capability and access to technology tools such as management consoles, CLI command line interfaces, and API access and consume the services on offer.
Private Cloud
This looks like a on-premises, but the cloud element of it comes from the additional administration software deployed to allow different parts of the business to carry out self-service tasks in provisioning the infrastructure (compute, storage, network, security) and software services from available services. Moreover, this model is designed for your business only, and you won't share any underlying resources with anyone external to your organization.
Therefore, a private cloud is a cloud deployment model in which an organization procures, installs, configures, handles, and manages all the necessary infrastructure and software components in-house.
Furthermore, one key advantage of the private cloud is that it gives you total control. That's why we can say that it is highly customizable to suit the needs of an organization. When in complete control, the organization controls the key areas, such as security and infrastructure configuration options. But it doesn't mean it is more secure than public cloud providers.
Hybrid Cloud
We can define a hybrid cloud as combining public and private clouds. In other words, a combination of IT services deployed on-premises and integrated with one or more third-party cloud providers (best of both worlds, isn't it?).
It seems evident that most companies will eventually move into this model. One main advantage of hybrid is it helps the organization to kick start their disaster recovery projects. That mainly needs network communication between the private cloud and the public cloud. Moreover, the disaster recovery solution is usually hosted in the public cloud, which enables the replication of the on-premises data and applications of the disaster recovery site hosted with vendors like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and etc.
One main advantage of a hybrid cloud, it can give the organization the advantage of testing out new cutting-edge technologies. The critical thing is when they're ready to implement the new technology, they can use a phased migration approach to lessen the interruption to normal business functions while it is under its way.
Note: Phase migration is the period of commencing and ending certain services to be performed.
What's Cloud Service Delivery Model?
Any provider, such as Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, has three service delivery models: IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
The underlying network, storage, and computing services that power an organization's line-of-business applications can be accessed and configured with great freedom under the IaaS model.
Moreover, it guarantees a faster infrastructure setup without worrying about upkeep, security, scalability, and installation strategies. Furthermore, it is a service that does not require the purchase of expensive physical servers and associated infrastructure and is based on a pay-as-you-go or fixed-rate basis.
It is ideal if your organization needs more control over how your infrastructure components must be configured (usually from the operating system layer up) to support a given application.
Examples
- Virtualization
- Azure Virtual Machines
- Amazon EC2
- Azure Networking
- Amazon Networking
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
This PaaS cloud computing model is designed to help organizations to remove the burden of configuring and managing underlying infrastructure resources such as computing, storage, and related network services.
Moreover, it helps organizations to focus on developing their application code and offers a platform to deploy and manage their application releases, updates, and upgrades.
It is ideal when the organization wants to focus on managing its own data and resources. Then the rest of the process is managed by the cloud provider.
A side note, depending on the cloud provider, the PaaS model may have the possibility to offer some degree of flexibility in the underlying infrastructure configured. For instance, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS OpsWorks, AWS Lambda, and Amazon Relational Database Service, to name a few, give the organization the necessary modifications to the underlying infrastructure and an additional level of flexibility.
Examples
Software as a Service (Saas)
This model application is entirely hosted and managed by the cloud provider. Moreover, it helps the organization not to focus or takes them away from setting up the physical infrastructure to host an application (eliminates the need to manage an application). In other words, your chosen cloud provider is taking care of it.
Furthermore, most SaaS applications are fully functional via a standard web browser. Thus, no client software is needed or required.
Examples
Summary
We looked at the three cloud computing models. We tried to categorize them and included some key points on how businesses can benefit from each. And we have also considered how a business can start its cloud journey, but most businesses will likely choose a hybrid cloud solution.
We also covered the IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS cloud service delivery models and showed some examples.
Stay tuned for more. Until next time, happy programming and happy cloud computing!
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