Cloud Recap
Cloud based development and deployment is fast becoming standard now days, as it let enterprises, to focus on the core business capabilities and deliver more value to their customers and be more profitable. Enterprises leverage cloud development to get rid of, most common, time & money consuming tasks to cloud, like Provisioning DEV/QA/Staging/Production virtual machines with required configurations & Permissions, Hardware, software & bandwidth purchases and maintenance. Provisioning different database, fast session/cache storage, media storage, NoSQL DB, Big data databases and elastic load balancing etc. To deliver the valuable products/functionality faster to their client companies are thinking out of the box and moving towards outcome based and collaborative approach, and that’s where cloud come to their rescue.
23 Benefits Cloud Offers to CIO, IT Managers and developers
- Lower costs, “Pay as you use”, Pay-as-you-go Model
- Free you from applying Software updates on servers
- Backups in multiple regions and automatic recovery.
- Data hosted centrally and can be used from across the world on any device
- Increased Scalability/Elasticity(Dynamic Scaling)
- Fail over/ Disaster Recovery/Business continuity/High Availability/Reliability across regions
- Monitoring services
- Data storage in multiple formats is available.
- On Demand compute power(1- 1000 CPU/GPU)
- Shared Resources(Hard Disk Space, RAM, Processor)
- Increased Mobility/Universal Access/Improve accessibility
- Less or No CAPEX
- Easy to Manage
- High Productivity
- Environment Friendly
- Less Deployment Time/ On-Demand Self-Service
- Reduced IT Capital cost, especially upfront cost, pay as you go model.
- Outcome based and collaborative development in cloud from anywhere in world.
- Globalize your workforce on the cheap
- Minimize licensing new software
- Scale your IT Resources up and down based on your needs.
- Use your existing development skills to build cloud applications.
- Respond quickly to changes in your business and customer needs.
10 reasons why cloud computing is becoming very popular:
- Scalability/Elasticity: Whenever we want to scale up and down, it’s very easy via Microsoft Azure cloud. In Windows Azure you just need to configure the auto scale service and schedule date and time when that instance will be running. You can use Microsoft Appfabric for distributed Session and caching to support scalability in your application. Azure enables you to easily scale your applications to any size. It is a fully automated self-service platform that allows you to provision resources within minutes. Elastically grow or shrink your resource usage based on your needs.
- Outcome and collaboration based approach: enterprises need results faster to be competitive in market and hence need outcome based solutions, which can be used collaboratively developed and accessible from any device anywhere in the world. That’s how cloud come into picture fulfilling all the requirements of CIO and IT & Product managers.
- Software updates: You need not bother about software updates and OS patching. These things will be taken care by Microsoft Azure.
- Flexibility: Cloud computing allows users to deploy applications easily and rapidly as it is required in Agile environment. Azure DocumentDB along with existing NoSQL offerings from MongoDB, Nodejitsu, RavenHQ and Redis available in the Azure Store now give customers expanded choice for these scenarios. Azure HDInsight support for Apache HBase™ generally available. Microsoft Azure VM Depot have more than 300 pre-configured Virtual Machine images spanning base operating system distributions (such as Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, Suse and FreeBSD) through developer stacks (such as LAMP, Ruby on Rails, Node and Django), to complete applications (such as WordPress, Drupal, sharepoint and Apache Solrfor Microsoft Azure. Expanding choice for customers in technology and development platforms.
- Availability/Disaster Recovery: You need not worry about availability of your server as this will be taken care by Microsoft Azure. Windows Azure enables you to mitigate these risks by using multiple instances of resources. In case of windows Azure storage accounts which contain blobs, tables, queues, Windows Azure maintain multiple redundant copies. By default Windows Azure uses geo-replication to make copy of your data in another data center, using Geo-replication, in addition to the multiple copies of data held in the data center that hosts you storage account. Azure delivers a 99.95% compute SLA and enables you to build and run highly available applications without focusing on the infrastructure. Azure have built in network load balancing and resiliency to hardware failure. Azure supports a deployment model that enables you to upgrade your application without downtime.
- Powerful Capabilities: Azure delivers a flexible cloud platform that can satisfy any application need. It enables you to reliably host and scale out your application code. You can store data using relational SQL databases, NoSQL table stores, and unstructured blob stores, and optionally use Hadoop and business intelligence services to data-mine it.
- Universal Access: cloud computing can allow remotely customers/employees to access applications and work via internet. Giving maximum reach to your application.
- Reduction of costs: unlike on-premises hosting, the price of deploying applications to the cloud will be less due to lower hardware costs from a more effective use of physical resources, as well because of “Pay as you Go” model adopted by many cloud providers.
- Speed of creating or configuration Dev/Test/Staging/Prod Environments: No need to create request to your Infrastructure group for creating VM or wait on the request to get completed. Now in Windows Azure, a developer/Manager can just run through a quick wizard in the online management console and in 5 minutes, have an entire dev and test environment spun up, that may include a Linux or Windows server, SQL Server or SharePoint.
- Continuous Innovation: Gallery of innovative Apps to install from, in few minutes, in each of 40+ categories in Azure. Many of these apps are open source and free. These apps add value to your cloud applications. One Such app is Application Insight 360 for ASP.NET MVC applications, using this app you can monitor and pin point all performance & exception issues in your application code. Many new apps are added on daily basis to increase the efficiency, effectiveness of your cloud apps.
Cloud Composition
- Virtual Server: Many physical servers are consolidated into Virtual Servers depending on how capable your physical servers are. For example, one physical server can contain 40-60 virtual servers. A virtual server is created by partitioning the physical server into multiple mini servers, made possible by the technology of server virtualization. Lower number of physical servers reduces hardware maintenance.
- Virtualization: A physical server has a virtual server instance called virtualization. Virtual Servers are possible because of virtualization.
- Cluster: Two homogenous/heterogeneous virtual servers are made part of cluster. Virtual server clustering can improve disaster recovery, load balancing, availability and management in your data center. Benefits are:
- Server consolidation, regardless of operating systems
- Increasing the availability of a consolidated server during:
- During scheduled maintenance of host hardware
- During scheduled updates to host software
- Hypervisor: This is heart of virtualization, it’s a software layer introduced between the HOST Server OS and Hardware of physical server. A hypervisor or virtual machine monitor (VMM) is a piece of computer software, firmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines. A computer on which a hypervisor is running one or more virtual machines is defined as a host machine. Each virtual machine is called a guest machine.
- Data Center: A Data Center contains computer infrastructure, servers, backup mechanism, backup power supplies and network. Thousands of cluster form together form DC.
