Meaning of Cloud
The cloud has been raining attention lately, and in 2023, it's the forecast for everyone, whether they're cloud-conscious or cloud-nine-conscious. In fact, the website you're currently browsing is floating high up in the cloud! But what, precisely, is the cloud? Is it situated up in the clouds, like a digital skyscraper? I trust this blog will not only rain down knowledge but also clear the air on this misty term.
Before Cloud
Before we dive into what the cloud is, let's look at how businesses operated in the pre-cloud era. You see, all software needs some hardware to run on. Back in the day, companies had to buy and take care of the hardware their software needed to run. This meant they had to spend a lot of money on both keeping the hardware in good shape and hiring skilled people to manage it.
If you've had experience in the software industry, you're likely aware that companies are continually striving to cut down on their operational expenses. Software as a Service (SaaS) companies, in particular, sought to escape the burden of managing their hardware infrastructure. This is where the idea of the cloud emerged. Imagine a scenario in which a company could offer dependable hardware as a service, at a low cost, with no need for maintenance overhead. This was a dream come true for SaaS companies that had previously been maintaining their own on-premises solutions.
Emergence of Cloud
One of the first companies to achieve success as a cloud service provider is Amazon Web Service (AWS). AWS started off as a way for Amazon to provide scalable and flexible computing solution for its own e-commerce operations, but soon they evolved into a service that other businesses could use. At the same time, many companies like VMWare, Google, IBM and Microsoft started building their own cloud ecosystems for both internal as well as external use. AWS popularised the concept of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) where companies could buy and use computing power with minimal capital cost and operational overhead.
Although IaaS is a major part of the whole cloud architecture, it is not the only cloud offering. Even before IaaS was popular, companies like Google and Salesforce had softwares that were delivered over the internet. These are known as SaaS services. Another abstraction built on similar concept is Platform as a Service (PaaS). This allows customers to build deploy and manage applications over the browser.
Architecture of Cloud
Architecture of OpenStack cloud platform Source:https://www.openstack.org/software/
OpenStack is an open source cloud computing platform. Most modern cloud providers like AWS, Azure, GCP uses an architecture similar to the above. Cloud architecture followed a tiered approach. At the bottom most layer you have the Computing, Networking and Storage services which enables most of the cloud functionality. Another interesting low level service is the hardware lifecycle service. As you might have already figured out, even cloud is nothing but a huge room of hardware in some datacenter. Hardware Lifecycle management service ensures the datacenter hardware are up to date on firmware, fixes any hardware faults and refreshes the hardware before it gets reused by a new customer.
The low level services form the core of any cloud platform. The next most important services are monitoring tools, Orchestration services and Optimization services. These services are aimed to simplify operations for customers adopting the cloud and managing infrastructure at scale. Furthermore cloud companies release a variety of SaaS services and AI services that integrate with their cloud platform.
Summary
The backbone of any cloud company is it's infrastructure. The most difficult part in Cloud optimization is infrastructure optimization. I hope this blog helped to demistify the concept of cloud computing, and you realise that at the end of the day, cloud is not very complex. It is a very simple idea of abstracting hardware details from customers.
Written by Aswin Unnikrishnan. 11/12/2023