Cloud - Something to think about...

"What did the term "Cloud" mean to you when you first heard it?"
I have asked this question for a number of years and the most common answer is "I thought cloud was mostly storage".
Storage is certainly an important piece of the cloud, but cloud is so much more.
Why do so many people think it is just storage? The cloud is very vague concept and many of us like to understand things in a way that we can relate to, and storage fits that description, plus we know data has to be saved somewhere. I worked as a storage and systems software engineer for many years so, the first time I heard the term cloud, I also assumed it was mostly storage.
My first cloud project was probably 12 or 14 years ago at a different company. We had to help a big customer develop a prototype for what they were calling "PaaS". This PaaS term was strange to me at the time, but I will save that for a different post. I ended up working in the storage component for this prototype which was fine with me but it did keep me stuck in the cloud=storage for a while.
The best way that I have found for people to better understand cloud concepts beyond storage is to start with the 5 cloud characteristics that were defined a number of years ago by the NIST organization. (See my previous post here for more details: https://www.dell.com/community/General-Discussion/Digital-IT-Transformation-and-Cloud-Computing/m-p/8058610#M6855). The second way to make the cloud more real is to get some hands-on experience with several cloud technologies. Hands-on work helps to solidify the concepts, plus it helps people understand how tasks or requests that may take weeks or months in a tradition IT environment can sometimes be done in hours or days with a cloud.

Another cloud description or comment that I have heard many times in the last 10 years, and from people in many industries or professions, is something like this: "the cloud is out there somewhere but no one knows where it is". Have you heard this too? I understand where some of this comes from, but I will discuss that in my next post.
-Bob
#IWork4Dell

Where is a private cloud?

 

In my previous post, I focused on where public clouds are but what about private clouds? Where are they located?

There are multiple options for an organization's private cloud; a common one, as expected, is onsite (I.E. in the organization's data center), but it can also be hosted externally (managed provider, public cloud provider, etc.).  Yes, a private cloud could even be hosted at a public cloud provider like AWS. Doesn't that seem a little odd? Like an Oxymoron - How can a private cloud be in a public cloud provider?

Well, it is all about protecting access. Organizations may decide to have their private cloud 'hosted' somewhere else, so they don't have to worry about some of the usual concerns of managing equipment onsite, cost, extra staff, etc., but they want to ensure they are the only ones that can access their cloud.

In my university classes, a question that sometimes comes up in the discussion about private cloud is that the NIST definition for cloud computing lists five cloud characteristics, including "Broad Network Access". At first glance, this might be misinterpreted as "complete access to everyone on the internet" but, that is not what it means.  I described the following in a previous post (link

In a private cloud, the good news is that Broad Network Access just refers to the people in your organization having access rather than being available to the full internet. Credentials still limit access internally as they do now.

There are plenty of private clouds hosted externally and we sometimes get a glimpse into how many when a public provider site or zone goes offline and we see the ripple effect.

So back to our original question: Where are private clouds located? 

Although the answer is "it depends", you now know that the equipment used to run a private cloud could be onsite, or could be located at an external provider.

What about hybrid or multi-cloud?  Where are they? We will discuss them in future posts.

-Bob

#IWork4Dell

Where is a hybrid cloud located?

Recall that a hybrid is two or more clouds. These could be any type of cloud but, for most organizations, their hybrid cloud consists of their private cloud and one public cloud provider.

We already know from a previous post that public clouds have many locations across the globe (I.E. zones) and that private clouds are typically in an organization's data center but could be hosted by an external provider.

So, if you put them together, as in a hybrid model, the footprint can be pretty big. Sometimes organizations will use multiple services from a public cloud provider which could be spread across multiple zones.

Let's consider an example where a company has it's own cloud and also hosts it's own web storefront. Historically, the company has consistent orders for most months except they have had several big order surges when celebrities or social influencers have said something positive about the company and their products. The problem is, they don't know when that might happen and they found their webstore could barely keep up with demand when this has happened.

Rather than buy or lease more hardware for their data center to handle these occasional but random surges, they decided to utilize AWS and spin up their webstore application on AWS compute instances (called EC2) and they utilized other services like databases and storage. They designed them to be highly available so that an outage in one AWS zone wouldn't kill the webstore applications running. The company also uses AWS services for backup and recovery.

If you were to map out all the real (I.E. physical) locations of the systems used to support the webstore, both in-house and at AWS, there could be many locations represented.

It gets even more complicated with multi-cloud but we will save that for another post.

-Bob
#IWork4Dell

My first exposure to the term "cloud" had me imaging a room full of servers that provided data storage, data management, and data throughput. I am not as confident that such is a good definition.

 

Tim brings up a good point.  If you do a google image search for "cloud data center" or "cloud server room" (or something similar), a bunch of pictures will come up showing something similar to what Tim describes in the previous post. 

I often hear people say something like "the cloud is out there somewhere" or they talk about their data floating in space.  Well, your data has to exist in a datacenter somewhere, whether that is in one or more of the many cloud data centers that AWS, Microsoft, Dell or others have around around the world, or it could be in a private cloud data center (hosted either in-house or at a service provider, etc.).   You may not care where it exists as long as it is secure and always accessible to you.   

How is a 'cloud' different from data centers that have been around for a long time?  Some of it comes down to things you can't see by looking at a data center room.   In a previous post I describe what the cloud means according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and specifically the five essential NIST cloud characteristics.  Checkout the post at    (https://www.dell.com/community/General-Discussion/Digital-IT-Transformation-and-Cloud-Computing/td-p/8058610   and view my second reply on page 1. (It starts with "A digital transformation often involves a cloud but what does "cloud" really refer to?)  

I hope this helps!

-Bob
#IWork4Dell

Cloud Podcast

One of the boards available on this Dell Community Education Services Site is called Blogs & Podcasts.

Click here listen to my new podcast called: Cloud - What it Takes and How to Get Started 

-Bob
#IWork4Dell