Nowadays, more and more enterprises adopt cloud computing technology when developing modern applications, which requires understanding the key characteristics that distinguish cloud computing from traditional local IT architecture. Although cloud computing has brought more and more tools and technologies, its key features remain unchanged. Many people may not understand it, so let Micronet take you to understand it today.
In 2006, when AWS began to sell computing resources and storage instances, cloud computing was popularized as an alternative internal deployment infrastructure. Google and Microsoft are also closely behind them. Today, cloud computing has expanded from infrastructure to SaaS mode, as well as in various fields such as artificial intelligence, container, serverless, database, Internet of Things, private network, analysis, and commercial applications.
Each cloud platform has its own advantages and challenges, but all these cloud services have some core functions. The following Micronet uses eight qualitative methods to show you the cloud computing server, which can help explain why cloud computing is needed to build and deploy modern applications.
1. On demand calculation and self-service settings
On AWS, Windows Azure, Google Cloud and other public cloud platforms, users can call these resources by clicking buttons or APIs. Because these cloud computing providers own and operate data centers around the world, they have a lot of computing and storage resources. This is a fundamental progress for IT teams accustomed to deploying procurement processes internally.
The self-service provision feature of the cloud is closely related to the on demand computing capability. Unlike delivering more servers to private data centers, developers can choose the resources and tools they need (usually self-service portals of cloud computing providers) and build them immediately. The strategy formulated by the manager will limit what the IT team and the development team run, but in this strategy, team members can freely build, test and deploy applications they think are appropriate.
2. Resource combination
Public cloud providers rely on multi tenant architecture to accommodate more users at the same time. The workload of customers is abstracted from the hardware and underlying software, which serve multiple customers on the same host. Cloud providers increasingly rely on custom hardware and abstraction layers to improve security and speed up user access to resources.
3. Scalability and rapid elasticity
Since computing, storage, network and other assets can be added or deleted as needed, resource pools provide scalability for cloud computing providers and users. This can help the enterprise IT team optimize the workload carried by the cloud platform and avoid end-user bottlenecks. The cloud can be expanded vertically or horizontally, and cloud computing providers can provide automated software to handle dynamic expansion.
Conventional on premises deployment architecture is not easy to extend. In general, companies must plan for maximum capacity by purchasing servers and other infrastructure assets. These extra resources are idle during activity pauses.
Although extensibility tends to describe the long-term planning of cloud computing infrastructure, rapid elasticity is more like a short-term function. If unexpected demand surges occur, correctly configured cloud computing applications and services will automatically add resources to handle the load immediately. With the decline of demand, its cloud computing services will return to the original resource level.
4. User paid pricing
Due to the billing service per second provided by the cloud computing provider, this cloud computing feature transfers IT expenditure from capital expenditure to operational expenditure. Although people often think of this as a positive factor, IT teams must be careful because their resource needs may not be stable. The virtual machine used should have an appropriate size, which should be turned off when not in use, or shrunk as needed. Otherwise, the enterprise will waste costs and pay more when receiving the monthly bill.
This price model used to be the only payment method for cloud computing, but cloud computing providers later joined various price plans, often at lower costs in exchange for long-term commitments.
5. Service measurement
It is useful for cloud computing providers and their customers to assess service usage. Providers and customers monitor and report on the use of resources and services, such as virtual machines, storage, processing, and bandwidth. These data are used to calculate the customer's cloud computing resource consumption and input the user payment mode. At the same time, cloud computing providers can better understand how customers use their resources and potentially improve infrastructure and services.
6. Flexibility and Supply
Cloud service providers use a variety of technologies to prevent failures, such as minimizing regional dependencies to avoid a single point of failure. Users can also extend the workload across zones. These zones have redundant networks that connect several relatively close data centers. Some more advanced services automatically distribute workload between workspaces.
These systems are certainly not absolutely reliable. If business interruption occurs from time to time, the enterprise must formulate an emergency plan. For some enterprises, this means expanding the workload to independent regions or even different platforms, although doing so will bring high costs and complexity.
7. Safety
So far, no damage has been found to the basic resources of the main cloud computing platforms. Although many enterprises are reluctant to migrate workloads for security reasons, these concerns have basically disappeared, partly because of the benefits of the above features of cloud computing. The world's leading cloud computing provider employs the best security experts in the world, and generally handles threats better than most internal IT teams. In fact, some of the world's largest financial institutions believe that cloud computing is a safe asset.
However, this does not exempt users from their responsibilities. Public cloud providers follow the shared responsibility model - they tend to maintain the security of the platform, while users are responsible for the security of their own applications. Failure to understand these boundaries will lead to the leakage of sensitive data of some enterprises.
8. Widely use the network
One of the advantages of the cloud is that it is ubiquitous. Users can access data from anywhere through the global Internet connection, and also upload data to the cloud platform. Because most enterprises use a mix of operating systems, platforms and devices, cloud computing is very attractive.
Cloud service providers maintain extensive network access by monitoring and ensuring that various indicators (latency, access time, data throughput, etc.) reflect users' access to cloud resources and data. This includes service quality requirements and service level agreements.
These are the eight qualitative points that Micronet summarized for you to see through the content of cloud computing servers. Huawei Cloud, the agent of Micronet, is an excellent cloud computing service provider, with perfect industry solutions and excellent cloud computing technology. The self-developed pure SSD architecture ECS breaks the industry record with 50000 IOPS random read/write speed and 800 Mb/s throughput as performance indicators. The ECS elastic cloud server uses hardware devices with a pure SSD architecture. In just a few minutes, you can easily obtain and enable the cloud to meet your computing needs. Expanding the flexibility of resource use also saves you computing costs, simplifies IT operations, and enables you to pay more attention to core business innovation.
