Cloud Concepts

Getting Started with AWS CCP

What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing is the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer.

Amazon is the biggest cloud provider.

Evolution of cloud hosting

1. Dedicated server : -> One physical machine dedicated to a single business. -> Runs a single web-app/Site => Very expensive, High maintenance, High Security. USED IN PARTICULAR CASES.

2. Virtual Private Server (VPS) : -> One physical machine dedicated to a single business. -> The physical machine is virtualized into sub-machines. -> Runs multiple web-apps/sites. => Better Utilization and isolation of Resources

3. Shared Hosting : -> One physical machine, shared by hundred of businesses -> Relies on most tenants under-utilizing their resources. N.B : you won't have a sub-machine but you will get a folder with permissions that you could use => Very cheap, Limited functionality, Poor Isolation.

4. Cloud Hosting : -> Multiple physical machines that act as one system. -> The system is abstracted into multiple cloud services => Flexible, scalable, secure, cost-effective, High Configurability.

What is Amazon :

An American multinational computer technology corporation headquartered in Seattle, Washington. -> As the Gartner Magic Quadrant for cloud stated, Amazon is the CSP in general as is the first to come up with this technology .

Gartner Magic Quadrant for cloud is a series of market research reports published by IT consulting firm Gartner that rely on proprietary qualitative data analysis methods to demonstrate market trends, such as direction maturity and participants.

What is a cloud Service Provider (CSP) :

A cloud Service Provider (CSP) is a company which :

• provides multiple cloud services e.g. tens..to hundreds of services

• Those Cloud Services can be chained together to create cloud architectures. here is an example of chained services to build an web application
• Those Cloud Services are accessible via single Unified API e.g. AWS API

• Those Cloud Services utilized metered billing based on usage e.g. per second, per hour..

• Those Cloud Services have rich monitoring built in e.g. AWS CloudTrail => Every action is tracked and you have access to that.

• Those Cloud Services have Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering => Have networking compute, storage databases.. thing like that.

• Those Cloud Services offers automation via Infrastructure as Code (IaC) => write code to set everything up and so..

=> If a company offers multiple cloud service under a single UI but do not meet most of or all of these requirements, it would be referred to as a Cloud Platform e.g. Twilio, HashiCorp, DataBricks..

Landscape of CSPs :

Common Cloud Services :

A CSP can have hundreds of cloud services that are grouped into various type of services, the four most common types of cloud services (the 4 core) for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) would be :

AWS technology overview :