Sometimes when I am speaking with people and I am mentioning them that my special area is the cloud service, they are just looking up to the clouds on sky. From that perspective the name is quite funny. However, in the 21st century it has a significant importance. We can say that almost all companies/people are using at least one cloud service, although, they are not aware that the service they are using a clear cloud service.
The cloud service can be imagined on the best and easiest way that you are using many applications/services but the user does not have any information where the service/application is running physically. Of course, we could say that we had similar solution in the past because when we opened a web page in the browser we had no idea where it were really running. But in case of cloud service we are not talking only about web pages. Cloud services can cover many different type of services: web pages, virtual machines, Visual Studio instances, office applications etc. Today it is also possible to seamlessly integrate these cloud services into our company infrastructure.
The most known cloud services: G-Mail, Dropbox, OneDrive, Outlook, Office 365, Google Drive
What other service can be created in cloud:
- Virtual machines
- Data backup and restoration, archiving
- Complex mailing systems
- Firewalls
- Virtual LAN and WAN networks
- Databases
Generally there are three different type of cloud services depending on what the customer would like:
- IaaS: infrastructure services. This type includes the virtual machines, data backup and restoration, virtual networks etc. Every services which can be part of a company’s IT infrastructure.
- PaaS: platform services. In this case the cloud ensures the environment for running some application However, the application must be installed, configured and used by the customer. Etc.: web application ==> in this case the user installs/deploys the web application to the platform service which is ensuring to it is published to the internet and everyone can access it. The user does not have information where the web server is running and what is the type of the back end system of it. The stability and the reliability of the hardware is under the responsibility of the cloud provider.
- SaaS: software as a service. In this case the cloud in ensuring both the platform the application. Here the user just need to use the application and pay all connected costs (e.g.: license cost). This type of applications are like: Dropbox, G-Mail, Microsoft Office 365 etc.
Software-defined Datacenter (SDDC)
This definition appeared parallel with cloud services. This means basically that everyone can create its own logically separated datacenter on any cloud providers. Of course, this does not rule it out to the company has its own on-premise datacenter locally. The two environments can work parallel next to each other. It is also possible to have the cloud environment as a back environment of the on-premise one.
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Why is this good?
Using the cloud services have many advantages even for a small company. The computing capacity is practically infinity (only the cost is the biggest obstacle). The storage capacity is also infinity (also the cost can be the only obstacle – 1 TB low performance storage costs approx. 40 €/month). From data security perspective cloud services fulfills the possible highest requirements (including GDPR). From disaster recovery perspective it also assures the possible highest requirements.
Last, but not least, significant cost-saving can be achieved if the cloud services are used on a clever way. It is possible to stop the virtual machines when it is not used. In this case only the storages generate some cost. The virtual machine computing cost is not calculated. It is also possible to automatically resize the computer for the weekends. In this case the server can remain online, but its performance can be much less then normally on weekdays. All these or similar jobs can be created and periodically run within the cloud.
