The Cloud Revolution

Have you ever wondered how you could back up your phone's pictures when you accidentally deleted them? This is because of a particular technology's existence which made our lives easier. This, is Cloud. Let's dive deeper into how this technology works in this blog.

What is Cloud?

To begin with, The term cloud is used to refer a collection of servers which are not physically with us. Since they are far from us, we assume them to be in the air (well,not exactly). This is where the term cloud was coined first.

Cloud Deployment Methods

Cloud can be deployed and managed in three different ways, Public Cloud, Private Cloud and Hybrid Cloud.

Public Cloud

Public cloud is a cloud infrastructure where services are offered over the internet. These services are owned and maintained by third-party Cloud service providers. These services are shared across multiple organizations. Some of the public cloud providers are Amazon Web services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure etc.

Private Cloud

Private cloud is an environment which is dedicated to one particular organization. This Cloud services can be provided on-premises, within the organizations' data center or off-premises which will be managed by a third-party providers but still be managed exclusively for a particular organization.

Hybrid Cloud

As the name suggests, It is the combination of both the private and the public cloud. Organizations can take the advantage of both environments according to their needs. These are used for flexibility, load balancing, data recovery and back ups etc.

Purpose of Cloud

Let's imagine a company needs a server for emails and 2 servers for data base. One is the original one and the other is for back up. And it has it's own DNS server. Each of the servers run on specific RAM and server configurations. So it's highly impossible to run 3 thing on a same server. But most of the times, the servers don't need the entire RAM or entire CPU. But the servers have to run no matter how much load it's balancing. And the power consumption is also quite high. This can be very hard to run.

But with the existence of cloud,this job is done pretty easily. We can allocate all these things on a cloud ,specifying the configurations. We need to pay for the service on the basis of how much we use. There are cloud service providers who provide their servers for particularly this purpose.

To name a few, Amazon web services(AWS) provided by Amazon, Microsoft Azure provided by Microsoft, Google cloud platform provided by Google, IBM cloud, Oracle cloud Infrastructure.

Not only for hardware resources,cloud is also used for many other purposes,they are

Infrastructure as a Service(IaaS):

This is a service provided for the hardware resources, like virtual machines, virtual storage, as we discussed earlier. It is flexible enough to scale the resources up and down as per the users' choice. Some of the IaaS providers are AWS EC2, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Compute Engine.

Platform as a Service(PaaS):

This is a service provided for the developers to build, run their softwares without worrying about the underlying hardware infrastructure. Developers deploy their App on this platform and the cloud service providers take care of the load balancing, scaling and the servers. Some of the PaaS providers are Heroku, Google App Engine, Azure App services etc.

Software as a Service(SaaS):

As the name says, this service provides the users with the software and the server, the only thing the user needs to do is to use the app. The service providers themselves take care of the security, updates, infrastructure and maintenance.Some of the examples for this service are Google workspace(which includes Gmail, Google Drive, Docs etc), Microsoft 365 (with Powerpoint,Excel, Word) , Slack, a well known communication platform used by teams.It is fully cloud-based.

Function as a Service(FaaS):

It is a cloud computing model that allows the developers to run individual pieces of codes. It works similar to PaaS, But it is used for small pieces of codes in response to events, triggering that code to run. For example, Image processing when an image is being uploaded, Data transformation, real-time file processing etc. Some of the service providers are AWS Lambda by Amazon Web Services, Azure Functions by Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Functions by Google, IBM Cloud Functions by IBM etc.

Directory as a Service(DaaS):

It is a cloud computing model used for a centralized Directory service without the need of a physical server. Daas allows organizations to manage the users' Identities, Profiles, Access rights, Authentication in a centralized platform. DaaS providers also implement strong security measures like Encryption, Multi-factor Authentication(MFA) and compliance with the regulations. Some of the Daas providers are Okta, JumpCloud, Azure Active Directory, Google Cloud Identity,OneLogin.

As cloud being the current technological evolution, it is mandatory to know what the cloud is, as an IT professional. Each model has it's own uniqueness, so knowing different models beforehand can come in handy so that the perfect model is chosen for the organization according to it's needs.