Why should you care about the Cloud?

Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network

access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks,
servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and
released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

Let me ask a question - how do you do your business on-premises?

CapEx vs OpEx

CapEx stands for Capital Expenditure. If you maintain one or more data centers you
know all about provisioning that space, approaching adequate environments with
redundant power and air conditioning the server rex, servers themselves and their
redundancies. There is a lot of upfront cost.

What you’ll see in the Azure cloud, is that you move towards the operational
expenditure model also called OpEx, where in your subscription you’re able to
provide all the infrastructure you need and that takes care of so many additional
benefits, not the least of which is that you don’t have to worry about all of the
data center science, Microsoft takes care that for you. OpEx doesn’t hold a long-
term commitment; when the consumer doesn’t need the resources, he can contact the
service provider and terminate everything. Read

How old is your technology?

Technology is pretty expensive especially if you want to stay on the cutting edge.
How do you keep up to date because as you know hardware needs increased technology
every single day, it’s not particularly cheaper to do that on-premises!

After every 80 days, the previous hardware becomes obsolete in the market, a new
hardware with new technology replaces the previous one. And if we’re doing all
these things on premises then surely we can’t afford all these expenses. As
Microsoft, AWS, Oracle are the huge cloud service providers, every single day
thousands of devices replace the previous one. But if we just think about it to do
it on premises, then surely we can’t do that, and I must say we can’t afford that.

How flexible is your Infrastructure?

If you maintain a line of business web applications, how well are you able to adapt
to changing demands? If you have batch jobs that run every month, are you able to
scale up your on-premises hardware to make those jobs run faster and more reliable?

And also again redundancy refers to tolerance, you may be subject to Service Level
Agreement (SLA), Operational Level Agreement (OLA) and regulation of various types
of industry regulations, compliance requirements with your government, where your
business is located and so forth. Redundancy is to ensure uptime and availability,
all of this is very expensive to manage on premises.

How well do you scale?

As I already said, you may have periods of high demand where you need to scale your
compute power to balance load, for instance across multiple web servers whether
these are physical web servers or virtual machines running on virtualization hosts.
That kind of scaling agility is expensive to maintain in a single data center. But
if your audience is worldwide, if you’re geographically distributed internally, how
can you provide services in a way where the resources are placed geographically
closest to those groups?
It is extraordinarily expensive to build this kind of scale yourself. That’s why
the cloud computing concept was introduced where we all manage our resources and
data in a better way. We make sure of the uptime availability of our resources.

Cloud Metaphor

We have the internet which represents the cloud and if you look up in the sky and
you see the whole bunch of clouds, you don’t know what’s going on the other side of
the cloud. There could be airplanes up there or satellites but you’ll never know
and you probably don’t care on the ground. The way the cloud computing metaphor
works is that you are paying for the subscription to a service provider. For
example - Microsoft, in terms of Azure Eco System. You’re paying the provider to
take care of redundancy and scale and maintaining all the backend plumbing in that
environment.
Azure
And on the consumer side, you have the access method typically being a web browser
that you can load on your computer, your desktop computer, your laptop etc. and
consume those resources on the other side of the cloud.

If you’re an application developer, the same thing in that scenario as well -- you
have a development environment on your workstation and you interact with servers on
the other side of the cloud, the service provider side.

Elements of Cloud Computing Model

We have few major elements of the cloud computing mode.

Elasticity
It refers to dynamically adjusting the infrastructure with service demand. It’s a
short-term strategy. You may have some kind of traffic burst that overwhelms your
on-premises environment and if you extend into the Azure cloud, you can handle
those bursts by elasticizing or spreading out your workload.
Scalability
It’s a more general term. And it is the long-term strategy.

We have vertical scale where you scale your virtual machines instances up and down
dynamically. And in horizontal scaling you can respond to multiple instances of the
server for load balancing.
Pooling (Resource Pooling)
It refers to the Azure ability to give virtually unlimited compute storage and
network power and they give it to you on ‘tap’ or on demand. Of course, there is
cost behind it but it is so much easier and I think you’ll agree with me to do this
with a line of PowerShell or .NET code or a few clicks on the mouse of the Azure
portal as opposed to having all of the business meetings and signs off the required
and provisioning new hardware on-prem.

Also the key to the cloud computing model is that you pay only for what you use.
Provisioning
Specifically the notion of self service provisioning where in the cloud you don’t
necessarily have to be full administrator to provision resources. You may have
developers for instance who need to respond themselves to development paths that
consist of the database server, web server or an application server and even though
there are not any domain administrators, they can use self-service portal by a
couple clicks of the mouse and they have the environment ready for their use.

Azure supports Role Based Access Controller (RBAC) which means the Azure
administrator can delegated administration to a very granular degree.
Cloud Infrastructure and Delivery Model
There are different types of cloud infrastructure models.

Public Cloud
Private Cloud
Hybrid Cloud
Azure
Public Cloud

The first cloud infrastructure model is the Public Cloud where all services exists
in the internet. This is multi-tenancy, a good example would be the Azure cloud and
Azure related services like Office 365. All you need to access those services in
the internet connection, a web browser and the subscription to the service.

Private Cloud

It is opposite to the public. In this scenario, all the services exist in the
private network. And if you’ve been an IT for a while, you might be thinking that
you’re already maintaining the care and feeding your on-premises services for years
but honestly speaking cloud scenario is different from on-premises scenario.
Scaling up and scaling down involves a lot of expense to do in a private cloud
scenario and increases your complexity greatly. Microsoft, you probably know has
the System Center family from on-premises data center management but now Microsoft
is developing Azure Stack and this is dealing with standardization of the cloud
across public and private scenario. An Azure stack allows you bring down the cost
of deployment and management and lets you focus your energy and funs on higher
value services. (Azure Stack is the solution of private cloud, Microsoft Azure
provides the private cloud to the companies on demand.)

Hybrid Cloud

Very common is the hybrid cloud which is a secure private connection between Azure
and your on-premises environment and this is a very flexible way to do cloud
infrastructure. You can setup for instances site to site VPN or you can have a
dedicated connection that bypasses the internet, in Azure it is called
ExpressRoute.

Cloud Delivery Models

There are 3 models and any cloud service provider must provide these 3 delivery
models.
Azure
The big picture of these cloud models is

Now let’s deep dive into the details of these cloud models.

SaaS

Cloud Delivery Model starts with SaaS (Software as a Service). SaaS has the
consumer/customer as the target and the example is the Microsoft ecosystem would be
Office 365.

Office 365 is basically a complete application running on Azure at the backend. So

we can say Office 365 is a software as a service application by Azure. Similarly we
are all using Facebook a lot, Facebook itself is a SaaS model example. There is a
huge private cloud running at the backend of Facebook. And these type of
application can be easily used by any non-technical user. That’s why we say, SaaS
targets consumers.
In SaaS, consumer/customer just use the application and at the backend everything
is managed by the Cloud Provider.
PaaS

It is the Platform as a Service. It is targeted it to the developer, hosted

application development environment in the Azure cloud. An example is Azure App
Services.

In PaaS, you’re responsible only for the data and application. If any error occur
in these 2 layers then you’ll be handle your own. And for the rest layers,
Microsoft is responsible. As you’re using more resources at your end. So it is
costly then SaaS.
IaaS

And then we have infrastructure as a service. The target here is the system
administrator, and Azure VM is the product name play there.
Azure
This picture is just for understanding cloud delivery models by showing examples.
We can also work with Microsoft Azure in IaaS model as well and in more convenient
way than any other cloud.

This picture is telling us that there is no competitor in the world in

IaaS model of Amazon Web Services

PaaS model of Microsoft Azure
SaaS model of Facebook
So again repeating this picture is just showing us the info of the winner of the
competition, it doesn’t mean that we can’t work in IaaS on Microsoft Azure or can’t
work on PaaS model with Amazon.

Notice one more thing, if we use SaaS we get less control over things. We normally
just complete our all operations through GUI, we don’t get under the hood, we don’t
even think about it like in Facebook. Everything is managed under the hood by the
Cloud. We are just using it continuously.
Azure
As we move downward we get more control access, we can manage things on our own.
And if we move upward then you’ll get less control over things. In SaaS, as you’re
just using the application you’ll pay just for the application but in PaaS and in
IaaS you’re using other services as well and managing on your own then you’ll pay
more for that service.

In IaaS model, you’re managing 5 different layers your own. So you’re allocating
more resources than any other model. So that’s why it is more costly and expensive.
Get Started With Azure

Now you might be thinking about how to get started with Azure. Go to azure, here
you’ll see the big button for Start Free and you can sign up freely with $200 free
credit for 12 months. You can apply to any Azure service.