One of the key drivers thought to be at the moment is cloud Technology and many a times and for many companies Digital Transformation means switching over to Cloud Solutions from their current On-Premise solutions. To put things in perspective, On-Premise solution is the technological system landscape that is installed within the organizational boundary. That is, all the IT systems are owned and managed by the organization. Organization installs the infrastructure, platform and the application that runs on it. Where as in Cloud, the IT landscape is owned by the cloud service provider and organization uses and utilizes these services as per their requirement and pays for the service only as a subscription or as a license but does not own the system. This reduces the fixed cost that the organization would have incurred in the installation of the dedicated system and also the time and effort that would have taken for such an installation. Organizations can thus focus and invest on their core capabilities and business functions and remain competitive in the market. The cloud concept has been possible with the advent of new innovations and technological advances. The localized IT systems or a part there of, can now be managed by the external service provider, who are responsible for the capital investment of these solutions and customer organizations can benefit from ready to use available systems. As a result, on a broader level services like Infrastructure, Platform and Software can be provided by the cloud service providers which organizations can utilize, either all of these or part; depending upon their requirement and also which service the customer organization wants to keep with them and which to get from cloud.
These are further some additional service that cloud vendors provide but the mentioned ones IaaS, PaaS and SaaS are predominantly used. As mentioned earlier, sometimes there is a buss word that adopting cloud technology means going digital or embarking on digital transformation. In essence it is not. Because we are moving from one technology landscape to another and not first time on the technological journey or path. Cloud does enables though scalability and quick adaption to new solution changes.
Software as a service – SaaS
Application is provided and managed by the cloud service provider. Organizational users access the cloud-based applications, perform business transaction to support their business operations. Business users also maintain master data as a prerequisite for performing business transactions. Depending upon the business application and the industry it supports, some of the cloud applications may have built in master data to some degree and also some predefined business scenarios. Individual customers and people in general also use Software as a service quite frequently and is not limited to organizations only. The examples would be E-mails, Office 365 solutions, Some CRM solutions, Games, Networking sites etc.
Platform as a service – PaaS
Platform is provided by the cloud service provider. This is the scenario where organizations want to build their own applications by writing code but does not want to install their own platform. The platform is a development system, where application developers develop and run their software instead of owning and managing the underlying hardware and software layers. This is a computing platform including operating system, programming-language execution environment, database, and web server. Scalability is one of the key features of cloud environment where the underlying computing and storage resources scale automatically to match application demand so that the cloud user does not have to allocate resources manually. Examples would include Database, Development tools, Webserver etc.
Infrastructure as a service – IaaS
Infrastructure is owned and provided by the cloud service provider and this typically includes computing devices, storage devices and the involved network. The network can be based on internet or intranet over a virtual private network depending upon the customer requirement. The consumer is able to deploy and run their software, which can include operating systems and applications. Cloud providers supply these resources on-demand from their large pools of equipment installed in data centers. Example components are Computing, Storage, Load balancers and Network tools.
Cloud computing was popularized with Amazon.com releasing its Elastic Compute Cloud product in 2006. Amazon created subsidiary Amazon Web Services and introduced its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). In 2008, Google released the beta version of Google App Engine. In 2010, Microsoft released Microsoft Azure. In 2011, IBM announced the IBM SmartCloud framework to support Smarter Planet. In 2012, Oracle announced the Oracle Cloud. This cloud offering is poised to be the first to provide users with access to an integrated set of IT solutions, including the Applications (SaaS), Platform (PaaS), and Infrastructure (IaaS) layers. In 2012, Google Compute Engine was released in preview, before being rolled out into General Availability in 2013. In 2019, it was revealed that Linux is most used on Microsoft Azure. As of 2017, AWS owns a dominant 34% of all cloud (IaaS, PaaS) while the next three competitors Microsoft, Google, and IBM have 11%, 8%, 6% respectively according to Synergy Group.
Amazon Web Services – AWS
Amazon Web Services (AWS) provide a set of abstract technical infrastructure and distributed computing building blocks and tools as part of its cloud solution. AWS currently comprises more than 200 services including computing, storage, networking, database, analytics, application services, deployment, management, mobile, developer tools, and tools for the Internet of Things. The most popular include EC2 and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) allows users to have at their disposal a virtual cluster of computers, available all the time, through the Internet. AWS’s version of virtual computers emulate most of the attributes of a real computer, including hardware central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) for processing; local/RAM memory; hard-disk/SSD storage; a choice of operating systems; networking; and pre-loaded application software such as web servers, databases, and customer relationship management (CRM). Most services are not exposed directly to end users, but instead offer functionality through APIs for developers to use in their applications. Amazon Web Services’ offerings are accessed over HTTP, using the REST architectural style and SOAP protocol for older APIs and exclusively JSON for newer ones.
The AWS technology is implemented at server farms throughout the world, and maintained by the Amazon subsidiary. Fees are based on a combination of usage (known as a “Pay-as-you-go” model), the hardware/OS/software/networking features chosen by the subscriber, required availability, redundancy, security, and service options. Subscribers can pay for a single virtual AWS computer, a dedicated physical computer, or clusters of either.
There are many online video tutorials about the AWS basics. The following video provides a holistic overview about the amazon web services. The Video tutorial has been developed by the AWS Training Center.
Google Cloud Platform – GCP
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) provides infrastructure as a service, platform as a service and serverless computing environments. GCP is a suite of cloud computing services that runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search, Gmail and YouTube. Google Cloud Platform is a part of Google Cloud, which includes the Google Cloud Platform public cloud infrastructure, as well as G Suite, enterprise versions of Android and Chrome OS, and application programming interfaces (APIs) for machine learning and enterprise mapping services.
Alongside a set of management tools, it provides a series of modular cloud services including computing, data storage, data analytics and machine learning. To utilize the offered services, registration is required via a credit card or bank account.
Google’s App Engine, a platform for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers, was the first cloud computing service from the company. Since the announcement of the App Engine, Google added multiple cloud services to the platform.
Following Video from Google team provides high level information about the services offered by the GCP.
Another useful video from Google about the cloud, its journey, what actually it means and how one can get started with the GCP has been presented by the speaker eloquently.