Ultimate Learning Guide To Cloud Computing

Rather than owning their own computing infrastructure or data centers, companies can rent access to anything from applications to storage from a cloud service provider.

One benefit of using cloud computing services is that firms can avoid the upfront cost and complexity of owning and maintaining their own IT infrastructure, and instead simply pay for what they use, when they use it.

This Cloud Computing tutorial will help you understand why Cloud Computing has become so popular, what is Cloud Computing, types of Cloud Computing, Cloud providers, lifecycle of a Cloud Computing solution and finally a demo on AWS EC2 and AWS S3. With the increased importance of Cloud Computing, qualified Cloud solutions architects and engineers are in great demand. Organizations have moved to cloud platforms for better scalability, mobility, and security. In simple words, cloud computing is the use of network of remote servers hosted on the internet to store, manage and process data rather than a local server.

Stephen Fry explains the history of computer thinking and the revolution of utility in cloud computing in this 5-minute animation.

In 1963, DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), presented MIT with $2 million for Project MAC. The funding included a requirement MIT develop technology allowing for a “computer to be used by two or more people, simultaneously.” In this case, one of those gigantic, archaic computers using reels of magnetic tape for memory and was the precursor to what has now become collectively known as Cloud Computing. It acted as a primitive Cloud with two or three people accessing it.

There are usually three models of cloud service to compare: Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Each of these has its own benefits, as well as variances, and it is necessary to understand the differences among SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS to know how to best choose one for your organization.

Today’s computing technologies offer companies almost unlimited opportunities to dramatically improve productivity while substantially reducing costs. Presenting a challenge, however, is the choice to be made whether to enhance in-house capabilities or move some or all enterprise computing processes to the cloud. Analysis and comparison of corporate demands and computing options reveal that cloud computing provides the most comprehensive response to most of today’s, and tomorrow’s, critical corporate technological demands.

Infrastructure as a Service, or IaaS, is a cloud computing model which provides outsourced computing infrastructure to users and organizations. It can provide users with resources that include servers, network connections, storage, and features like content delivery networks and load balancing. IaaS providers maintain the equipment, while users rent or buy the specific services that they need.

The emergence of PaaS is designed to release application developers from much of this complexity, by providing them with the operational components underlying application development, such as operating systems, databases, and middleware, etc. Developers of business applications are released from the overhead of worrying about scalability and security issues and are free to focus on developing applications.

Cloud computing has become an essential part of most businesses. No matter the kind of business you have, a certain cloud type can work for you. There are public, private, and hybrid clouds today. However, although it has its pros, there are some cons as well. That is what I will be discussing in this post.

The economics of cloud computing can be quite complex to understand, as several factors impact your cloud ROI. For example, when choosing the right cloud solution, there are dozens of different configurations to choose from, each one differing in terms of the number of CPU cores, memory and local storage attached to it. To help you through that, let’s look into cloud economics in detail.

Put bluntly, the traditional assumptions of IT—stable workloads and predictable growth—are no longer tenable, having been undone by increased business process expectations and the accelerating rush to digital applications as the primary method of customer interaction.

These trends dislocate established IT economics and present IT groups with a financial challenge—one that threatens to topple their position as monopoly supplier of computing to the larger enterprise.

According to Gartner, there are seven risks about holding data in the cloud – Manek Dubash, Jon Honeyball and Microsoft’s Steve Plank and Andrew Fryer talk about these risks and what can be done to minimise them in this 14-minute video.

Cloud computing provides many advantages, such as speed and efficiency via dynamic scaling. But there are also a host of potential threats in cloud computing. These cloud security threats include data breaches, human error, malicious insiders, account hijacking, and DDoS attacks. In fact, a Ponemon Institute study indicated that overall, a data breach was three times more likely to occur for businesses that use the cloud than for those that don’t.

Cloud environments experience–at a high level–the same threats as traditional data center environments; the threat picture is the same. That is, cloud computing runs software, software has vulnerabilities, and adversaries try to exploit those vulnerabilities. However, unlike information technology systems in a traditional data center, in cloud computing, responsibility for mitigating the risks that result from these software vulnerabilities is shared between the CSP and the cloud consumer.

By asking a lot of questions before you engage your cloud providers you’ll save you a lot of potential headaches down the road.

But if you’re like most companies who are already utilizing the cloud to some degree, now’s a great time to reevaluate your providers’ security practices so you’re aware of any potential shortcomings.

The following questions will help you gauge a cloud provider’s security expertise, along with any risks posed by their services.

The transformative networked computing model can be categorized into three major types: Public Cloud, Private Cloud and Hybrid Cloud. The technology service can be accessed in various models and deployment strategies, including the most popular Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). The underlying infrastructure architecture can take various forms and features, including virtualized, software-defined and hyper-converged models, among others.

This article explores the key differences between the classifications of Public, Private and Hybrid cloud environments.

As more businesses move to the cloud to handle data storage, computing, and IT security, the shift has a potential to be disruptive to the way small businesses conduct business. While you want to stay ahead of the curve, the question remains: Which solution is right for your business?

Fears of cloud vendor lock-in stem from a number of places.

First, it’s the loss of control over the data and infrastructure that power business’ applications. Not having complete control over aspects like security, uptime, and overall infrastructure management can be a scary thing.

Next, it’s the dependence on a single vendor for so many critical needs. Your servers, data, networking, user management, and much more are in the hands of one company, so the dependence on your provider is huge. And if something goes wrong, it can be very detrimental to your business.

Serverless computing is a new trend in software development, it is used to build your application by deploying application’s functions separately. It reduces lots of steps in designing software architecture and deploying the application.

Although, you know you can take lots of advantages from the serverless computing but there is one more question that you have to answer yourself before starting to use this technology. The question is which provider you should use their service.

Containers have been helping teams of all sizes to solve issues with consistency, scalability, and security. Using containers, such as Docker, allow you to separate the application from the underlying infrastructure. Gaining that separation requires some new tools in order to get the most value out of containers, and one of the most popular tools used for container management and orchestration is Kubernetes. It’s is an open-source container orchestration tool designed to automate deploying, scaling, and operating containerized applications.

A cloud service provider (CSP) is a company that offers one or more pieces of cloud computing functionality including SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS.

Likely, the first thing you’ll discover when looking for a cloud service provider is that there’s a very large number to choose from. How do you know which provider is the right one for your small business? The key to success lies in the answers to these questions.

The available market is vast, with a myriad of providers offering an even larger number of services. From market giants like Microsoft, Amazon and Google through to smaller niche players offering bespoke services.

So how do you select the right cloud provider from so many? The answer is a defined selection and procurement process appropriately weighted towards your unique set of needs.

We’ve distilled the key factors into a definitive list of 8 consideration areas.

Cloud computing is a new technology that has great potential for the business world. Many business firms have implemented, are implementing, or planning to implement cloud computing technology. The cloud computing resources are delivered in various forms of service models which make it challenging for business customers to select the model that suits their business needs. This paper proposes a novel group-based decision-making method where a group of decision makers is involved in the decision process.

Each decision maker provides weights for the cloud selection criteria. Based on weight aggregations and deviations, decision makers would select the alternative which has the highest ratio of deviation to mean is selected. The method is illustrated with an example on the selection of cloud service models. This method is useful for IT managers in selecting the appropriate cloud service model for their organizations.

If your organization is looking to modernize mission-critical applications and you’re planning a cloud migration as part of this process, you don’t want to repeat others’ mistakes. So this post leverages those learnings to build a 10-step checklist of the major areas you need to consider and address to maximize your chances of a successful cloud migration.

Application migration is the process of redeploying an application, typically on newer platforms and infrastructure. The process involves the staging of the new environment before the actual cutover and requires coordination of IT teams at the time of cutover. If the migration is on a compatible platform, the application does not need to be recompiled.

A well-managed cloud can help you reach the highest level of cloud maturity, reduce risks, and drive down costs significantly. A sure-fire way to achieve a well-managed cloud is to follow best practices throughout your cloud lifecycle. This article guides you with five cloud management best practices that are crucial to enable your cloud success.

Shifting web applications to the cloud provides several technical advantages over locally managed servers. High availability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness are some of the most important benefits. However, the locally managed storage is still an attractive solution in a typical case of 10TB storage. Since Amazon offers lower storage pricing for huge amounts of data, readers are recommended to do their own analysis on the TCOs.

The SaaS market is by far the largest market, according to a Gartner study that reported that enterprises spent $182B+ on cloud services, with SaaS services making up 43% of that spend.

While SaaS is currently the largest cloud service in terms of spend, IaaS is currently projected to be the fastest-growing market with a CAGR of 20% plus over the next 3 to 4 years. This bodes very well for the “big three” providers, AWS, Azure and GCP.

With typical IT organizations spending over 30% of their budget on infrastructure (primarily data centers and data networks), shifting some or all of this work to the cloud can save organizations anywhere from 10-20% of their annual IT budget, savings that can either be returned to the firm or reinvested in growth and innovation.

This cloud run-rate economic advantage comes from two primary cost drivers: higher utilization rates as a result of a significant drop in “capacity hoarding” and lower unit costs from the increased scale, newer technologies, best practices, and improved operational efficiency of the cloud providers.

Architecting Cloud Computing Solutions: Build cloud strategies that align technology and economics while effectively managing risk. Scaling the IT environment, making it resilient, and reducing costs are what organizations want. Architecting Cloud Computing Solutions presents and explains critical Cloud solution design considerations and technology decisions required to choose and deploy the right Cloud service and deployment models, based on your business and technology service requirements.

Cloud Computing: From Beginning To End. This book covers not only the technical details of how public and private cloud technology works but also the strategy, technical design, and in-depth implementation details required to migrate existing applications to the cloud. After reading this book, you will have a much better understanding of cloud technology and the steps required to quickly reap its benefits while at the same time lowering your IT implementation risk.

Ahead in the Cloud: Best Practices for Navigating the Future of Enterprise IT. Stephen Orban led Dow Jones’s journey toward digital agility as their CIO and now leads AWS’s Enterprise Strategy function, where he helps leaders from the largest companies in the world transform their businesses. As he demonstrates in this book, enterprises must re-train their people, evolve their processes, and transform their cultures as they move to the cloud.

The Cloud Adoption Playbook: Proven Strategies for Transforming Your Organization with the Cloud. This book helps business and technology leaders in enterprise organizations sort through the options and make the best choices for accelerating cloud adoption and digital transformation. Written by a team of IBM technical executives with a wealth of real-world client experience, this book cuts through the hype, answers your questions, and helps you tailor your cloud adoption and digital transformation journey to the needs of your organization.

Cloud Computing by the University of Illinois. This course starts in the middle layer with Cloud Computing Concepts covering core distributed systems concepts used inside clouds, move to the upper layer of Cloud Applications and finally to the lower layer of Cloud Networking. We conclude with a project that allows you to apply the skills you’ve learned throughout the courses.

Amazon AWS Fundamentals: Going Cloud-Native. This course will introduce you to Amazon Web Services (AWS) core services and infrastructure. Through demonstrations, you’ll learn how to use and configure AWS services to deploy and host a cloud-native application.

Cloud Architecture with Google Cloud Partner Professional Certificate. This program provides the skills you need to advance your career in cloud architecture and provides a pathway to earn the industry-recognized Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect certification. You’ll deploy solution elements, including infrastructure components such as networks, systems and applications services, and you’ll gain real world experience through a number of hands-on Qwiklabs projects that you can share with potential employers.

Getting Started with Cloud Computing. This is the first course in a larger training program dedicated to the important subject of cloud computing. The training program is divided into several levels enabling students to start from scratch and grow their knowledge step by step or maybe select a specific level according to their knowledge and experience.