Cloud 101 – Understanding the Basics

In this chapter, we will introduce you to cloud computing and the key terminologies used commonly by cloud practitioners. We will briefly describe what public, private and hybrid clouds are, followed by a description of various cloud service models (offered by the service providers) including the features of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS)  and Software as a Service (SaaS).

One of the main cloud-based product design elements is multi-tenancy; often considered critical from a profitability and ROI perspective. So, we will spend some time discussing, at a high level, models of multi-tenancy and their implications on design and operations.

We will also discuss some of the traditional workloads being shifted to the cloud and others being developed from the ground up, to leverage cloud services, extensively. These include shifting in-premise systems to the cloud, replacing in-premise product offerings such as ERP and CRM applications with cloud-based versions, and using a mix of in-premise and cloud-based systems. Additionally, we will look at how a large number of modern big data applications, such as recommendation engines, large-scale analytics applications, machine learning pipelines, deep learning workloads, are being targeted for cloud environment deployment only.

To help you get started on AWS, we will end the chapter by walking you through a step-by-step process of creating an AWS account and describing some of the salient features of the AWS dashboard. 

This chapter will cover the following points:

• Define cloud computing and describe some of its characteristics
• Describe and compare public, private, and hybrid clouds
• Explain and compare IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS cloud service delivery models
• Explain multi-tenancy models and some challenges they present in design, implementation and operations
• Briefly describe typical cloud-based workloads
• Outline the steps to create an AWS account
• A brief overview of the AWS management console