When the term “the cloud” first began appearing in the beginning of 2000s, it carried an esoteric sound. The concept of accessing computing resources outside of an IT infrastructure on premises (the the sky?) seemed like a science-fictional idea. It was actually more complex and forever altered technology and the way the business world operates.
Cloud computing is what it sounds like?
Cloud computing is the provision of computing resources — such as processing power, storage and databases, as well as networking analytics, artificial intelligence and software applications via the Internet (the cloud). By outsourcing these resources companies have access to the computational resources they require, whenever they require them, and without the need to purchase and maintain an on-premise physical IT infrastructure. This allows for flexible resources, quicker innovation and also economies of scale. Many companies find that cloud move is linked to data storage and IT modernization.
Cloud computing characteristics
Prior to cloud computing, companies bought and maintained their own in-house IT infrastructure. While cost-savings were the primary driver behind the switch to cloud, many companies find that private, public or hybrid cloud infrastructure provides a variety of advantages.
To agile or DevOps teams Cloud computing gives teams the opportunity to streamline and speed up developing processes.
This are a list of features that define cloud computing.
Broad access to networks
Physical location of hardware is an important consideration in delivering the best user experience. Cloud computing can be a massive advantage by providing globally distributed physical hardware that allows companies to provide strategically-located hardware.
Resource pooling
The computing resources of a cloud infrastructure platform are divided dynamically and allocated according to the need. As cloud hosts’ physical machines are provisioned dynamically and shared among several tenants, cloud hardware is optimized for optimal use.
Measured service
Cloud infrastructure providers provide precise usage metrics which serve to provide information on the cost of usage. For instance, Amazon Web Services (AWS) gives usage for every service type in daily or hourly line items. Cloud service providers generally use an essentially utility-style pay-as you-go billing system that is tracked and implemented, which means that customers pay for exactly the amount of computer resources utilized.
Cloud deployments in different types
There are three main kinds that cloud applications can be deployed. Each one has its own advantages and businesses often reap the benefits of having several of them.
Clouds that are public
Public clouds deliver computing resources — servers, storage, applications, etc. online via a cloud provider, like AWS or Microsoft Azure. Cloud service providers operate and own all software, hardware, and the other infrastructure that supports it.
Cloud private
The term “private cloud” refers to a set of computing resources that are dedicated exclusively to an organisation. It may be physically situated in an organization’s own data center, or it could be hosted by a cloud service provider. Private cloud services provide greater levels of security and security than public clouds, because it provides the companies with a dedicated resource.
Private cloud users enjoy the main advantages of a public cloud with self-service, scalability, as well as elasticity, but also have additional benefits of greater control and personalization. Furthermore, private clouds offer greater levels of security and privacy since they are hosted on private networks that are not accessible to the public.
Hybrid cloud
Hybrid clouds consist of cloud services that are public and private (for instance, IBM Hybrid Cloud, powered by Red Hat), connected to technology that allows data and applications to collaborate. Highly sensitive services or applications may be stored in a private cloud that is secure while public-accessible web servers as well as customer-facing devices can reside in the cloud public. Many popular third-party cloud providers have hybrid cloud models which allows users to mix both public and private clouds to meet their requirements. This gives businesses more flexibility in deploying the requirements for their particular application’s infrastructure.
Cloud computing services
Cloud computing’s dynamic nature and capabilities computing provide the basis for the development of new high-level services. These services can not only enhance but also provide essential services to agility as well as DevOps teams.
Infrastructure as a Service
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) can be described as a basic cloud layer of service which permits companies to lease IT infrastructure, servers storage, networks, and operating systems from a cloud service provider. IaaS allows users to reserve and provide the necessary resources from physical servers warehouses. Additionally, IaaS lets users reserve computers that are pre-configured for specific tasks such as load balancers email servers, databases and distributed queues.
DevOps teams can make use of IaaS as an underlying platform to create an DevOps toolchain. This could comprise the use of a variety of third-party tools.
Platform as a Service
PaaS utilizes IaaS to allocate automatically the resources required to run the technology stack based on language. The most popular language tech stacks include Ruby on Rails, Java Spring MVC, MEAN, and JAM stacks. This is a unique and effective workflow that allows teams to concentrate exclusively on their own business applications and not be concerned about infrastructure and hosting issues.
Software as a Service
Software as a Service (SaaS) provides software applications via the internet, available on demand and generally through subscription. Cloud service providers host and manage the software, and handle updates as well as security patches as required.
Serve as a service
Function as a Service (FaaS) is cloud computing service that provides a platform on which users can create and run applications. This eliminates the need for developers to construct an infrastructure for the development and launch of applications.
Benefits of Cloud Computing
Cloud computing’s unique characteristics mean that cloud computing provide a variety of unique technological and business advantages. Here are the top cloud computing benefits that can be beneficial to agile teams.
Cost reduction
Cloud-based teams do not need to purchase their own hardware. Beyond the cost of hardware cloud providers try their best to maximise and optimize the use of hardware.
Greater scalability
Cloud computing allows auto-scaling functions for teams. Cloud applications are able to automatically shrink and increase their infrastructure resources according to surges in traffic.
More efficient
Cloud computing provides the most up-to-date and most powerful computational capabilities. Users can use the most recent computers with powerful multi-core CPUs. In addition, many cloud providers provide the most cutting-edge GPU as well as TPU hardware for demanding graphics, matrix and artificial intelligence processing. It providers regularly update with the latest processing technology.
Cloud computing providers also provide global networks for content delivery that store user requests and content based on geographical location.
Speed of execution improved
Teams using cloud infrastructures are able to more quickly implement and provide the value they promise to their clients. Agile software teams can benefit from cloud infrastructures to swiftly create new virtual machines in order to test and test new ideas and also automate processes for testing and deployment steps that are part of the workflow.
Security Boosted security
Private cloud hosting provides a security through firewalls, which improves security. Cloud providers also offer a range of security methods and tools to assist in the development of secure applications. Controlling access to users is a major security concern, and many cloud providers have tools that restrict access to users.
Integration and continuous delivery
Continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) is a crucial method for DevOps practitioners, which helps improve team efficiency and decrease times to market. Cloud-based CI/CD such as Bitbucket Pipelines, enables teams to automate the creation tests, deploy and test code without having to worry about the administration or maintenance on the CI infrastructure. Bitbucket Pipelines relies on Docker containers to ensure independence and reproducibility in the pipeline for release. Teams can execute commands to those they would run on their local machines however, with all the benefits of a new and repeatable setup for each release.
Monitoring and management of incidents in a comprehensive manner
Cloud deployments let teams join their software from beginning to end, which makes easy to track each part that make up the process. Monitoring is a comprehensive ability for DevOps organizations since it helps them address issues and incidents quicker. Alternatively, teams can automate scaling (up/down) in accordance with these metrics to minimize the amount of human intervention and expenses. Learn further on DevOps monitoring.
In the end…
Cloud computing solutions offers high-end computing capabilities that are available on demand which can be scaled as required with regular updates without the requirement to purchase and maintain an infrastructure on premises. Explore Atlassian’s cloud-based offerings.
