What is Cloud computing?
Today (pre-Cloud): Applications and services run in-house on your organization’s servers. For example e-mail and CRM.
Cloud: Applications, services, and virtualized servers are delivered by Cloud platforms (including VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, Google, Salesforce). Cloud platforms may be private, publicly accessible over the internet, or hybrid.
Why Cloud?
The Cloud Computing model is a blueprint for greater business agility and reduced costs. It provides capabilities including efficient resource pooling, self-service provisioning, chargeback, elasticity of services (expand and contract IT services to meet demand), simpler management, and improved service levels.
Rapid RIO and lower operational costs: Public Cloud platforms eliminate servers, storage, and other infrastructure items expenditure normally spent on running your applications in-house. Private Clouds with virtualization add a layer of abstraction between your server, network, and storage hardware to create pooled resources, and this dramatically improves utilization and return on investment.
Public Cloud platforms are “multi-tenant”: Thousands of customers share the same IT resources. The incredible economies of scale delivered by large Cloud platforms results in greater cost efficiences and new ways of working.
Elastic: Any Cloud service can be expanded or contracted based on business need. Elasticity of services reduces costs where Cloud compute power is scaled or contracted based on requirements. Assigned and re-assigned based on business priority.
Innovation and Business Agility: Business can provision Cloud services on demand to meet market requirements. Cloud infrastructure privately improves agility to respond to changes in business demand with pooled resources, automation and simplified administration, and the Public Cloud offers massive scale to rapdily respond to dynamic IT requirements no matter how large the demand becomes.
Now some necessary definitions.
Cloud Options and Architecture Types
Private Cloud - The first step for any business. Virtualization of existing workloads is the first step when launching a Cloud strategy in-house – optimizing infrastucture and planning for a Cloud based future. This is built internally on a virtualized platform from VMware, Microsoft, or Citrix. The compelling attributes of Cloud computing exist for Private Clouds, though tempered by the real limits of internal infrastructure budget and scale. Leading to the inevitable hybrid Cloud. Businesses will add Public Cloud services to their Private Cloud services to create the optimal Hybrid Cloud. The Public Cloud’s economies of scale result in cost reductions and massive compute capabilities on demand, which Private Clouds cannot match. Therefore the Hybrid Cloud model is not just pragmatic, it delivers the best of breed solution for each application category.
Example: VMware vSphere 5.0
Public Cloud - By far the best known, where a service provider makes infrastructure such vrtual servers (Iaas), and storage (IaaS), application platform development and runtime environment (PaaS), and applications (SaaS) available to anyone over the Internet. Cloud providers in the public context are very large companies who want to deal with a large numbers of customers using standardized offerings, delivering the lowest cost and most ability to scale.
Example: Google Apps for Business, Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure, VMware vCloud
Hybrid Cloud – In the real world where most most businesses will be. A hybrid of services sourced both from internal and public cloud infrastructures. The Public Cloud’s economies of scale result in cost reductions and massive compute capabilities on demand, which Private Clouds cannot match at that scale. Therefore analysis of application requirements and costs will determine private or public.