In this series of articles, I’ll present to you the main concepts of Cloud Computing as presented by AWS on their online certification: “Cloud Practitioner”.
Cloud computing refers to the on-demand delivery of IT resources and applications via the Internet with Pay-As-You-Go pricing.
It allows companies to avoid buying their infrastructures, in which case the would be subject to under or overuse.
AWS can be :
- Initiated within seconds
- Treat these a temporary and disposable
- Freeform the inflexibility and constraints
- More Agile and efficient
3 main factors influence agility :
- Speed
- Global reach within a moment’s notice
- New resources a click away
- Experimentation
- Experiment more often
- Operations as code
- Safely experiment
- Spin up servers in minutes
- Retour of re-purpose servers
- Testing different configurations
- AWS CloudFormation gives templated environments
- Culture of innovation
- Experiment quickly with low cost/risk
- Experiment more often
The AWS Infrastructure :
- Allows elasticity, scalability and reliability of computing resources
- Is distributed over regions: physical locations, containing multiple availability zones
- Availability zones (AZs): one or more discrete data centers, which offer power, networking, and connectivity in separate facilities
The AWS is highly available :
- Fault tolerance: Application operational during component failure, built-in redundancy of components
- Highly available: Systems always functioning and accessible. Downtime is minimized as much as possible, without human intervention.
Elasticity is the power to scale computing resources up or down easily, while only paying for the actual resources used.
Elasticity allows customers to :
- Quickly deploy new applications
- Instantly scale up as the workload grows
- Instantly shut down resources that are no longer required
- Scale down and don’t pay for the infrastructure
The overall infrastructure allows to :
- Use services at own pace
- Adapt consumption
- Launch new services or products
- Accommodate new strategic directions
- Run a wide range of applications
- Auto-scaling and elastic load balancing for scale up or down based on demand
- Deploy the system in multiple regions with lower latency and a better experience
- Innovative services and cutting-edge technology
- Virtually, support any workload
Security and compliance :
- Customer retains control over regions where data is located
- Security auditing often periodic and manual
- AWS cloud provides governance capabilities
- Industry-leading capabilities that meet the strictest security requirements
Data centers :
- Offer state of the art electronic surveillance
- Multi-factor access control systems
- Staffed 24x7
- Access is a strictly least-privileged basis
- Environmental systems minimize the impact of disruptions
- Multiple regions and availability zones enable resiliency
Reliability is the ability of a system to recover from system failures. Also focused on the ability to dynamically acquire resources to meet demand and mitigate disruptions.
A reliable system must have a well-planned foundation that can :
- Handle changes in demand
- Detect failure and automatically heal itself
Pay as you go pricing :
- Avoids dedicating resources to infrastructure
- Redirects focus on innovation and invention
- Reduces procurement complexity
- Enables elasticity
- Adapts to changes in business needs
- Improves responsiveness to changes
- Reduces the risk of over-provisioning or missing capacity