Cloud Computing – Basics (helps to prepare interviews and respective certifications – MS-900 and AZ-900)

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On Knowledge Junction we have started sharing basic questions – answers about Azure / SharePoint / M365 / Power Platform / Teams and so on. Basically interview preparation as well and helpful in preparing respective certifications as well

We have list of good articles for preparing Interviews on Azure, Azure AD, Azure Administration, SharePoint, SharePoint Migration, M365, Power Platform. Kindly please visit our Interview Preparation page

Today we will share some basics about Cloud Computing

What is Cloud computing?

1. Cloud computing is the provisioning of services and applications on demand over the internet
2. Servers, applications, data, and other resources are provided as a service.
3. Cloud computing is the delivery of computing resources like Servers(virtual machines), Storage, Software’s, Databases (such as SQL, NoSQL), Networking and many more over the Internet on PAY-PER-USE basis.
4. The company which provides cloud services are called “Cloud Provider” like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Oracle etc.

Example:

1. Consider mail service from any provider like Gmail service from Google. Almost everybody we have Gmail account.
2. This service is available over Internet.
3. Service is available on on demand. Whenever we want we are checking emails. We can use this service.
4. We use it but we dont know where Google stores our mails, how much storage is used- basically unlimited storage, no worries of storage, where our attachments goes, how those accounts are managed and so on.
5. Everything is abstract for us.
6. So this is the free service provided by Google for us. This is nothing but one of the very good example of cloud.
7. We use the service very much but we dont have to worry about storage, account management, easy extra services like reset password, forgot password , managing our account and so on.
8. Mail service is available all the time so high availability, no maintenance of our mails, free of cost, very reliable, security – we are believing on Gmail with our closed eyes, no issues of storage, no performance issue, available from any were – no location barrier, accessible from any device . So these are the benefits of Gmail service and so of Cloud Technologies.

What are benifits of Cloud Computing

• Cost :
  1. Organization can save Infrastructure and administrative cost
  2. Cloud computing reduces the expenses requires for buying hardware. Just needs to be paid based on use / consumption based model
  3. No need to purchase any servers and maintain them
  4. No need to hire IT expert to maintain hardware, servers, licenses and so on
  5. The possibility to pay the price as when required for additional resource
  6. The possibility to stop the price as when resources are not required/not used
• Scale / Elastic
  1. Scalability is the ability of the system to expand to handle the increasing amount of load.
  2. On demand provisioning of resources
  3. Increase (scale up) the resources as and when needed.
  4. Down the resources when not required
  5. Cloud computing supports two types of scaling
  6. Vertical scaling:
     • Vertical scaling means “scaling up“. Means increase the power of existing server
     • Example: Adding memory, cache, disk or CPU/Processors
  7. Horizontal scaling:
     • Horizontal scaling means “scaling out“. Means adding multiple servers to existing working unit
     • Here we didn’t increase the capacity of existing servers rather reduce their load by adding extra server.
• Reliable / High Availability
  1. Cloud computing providers provides data backup, disaster recovery.
  2. They make sure that redundancy is built so if one of the server / component fails then backup takes place. That means Fault Tolerance is in place and customer dosent affected because of some fail-over or disaster.
  3. Cloud provider maintains their up time of 99.9%. They grantees of 24*7 availability
• Secure
  1. Set of policies, technologies, applications, controls, procedures to protect data as well as infrastructure
  2. We have physical security and digital security
  3. Physical security – securing servers, building where servers are available
  4. Digital security – Authorization – who can connect to data
  5. Cloud providers providers all those policies, technical expertise, applications, utilities to have the security in place
  6. For physical security cloud providers invest a lot in instruments like gates, cameras, walls, buildings, security personnel and so on.
• Speed / Performance
  1. Implementing applications in cloud allows organizations fast to implement and make available in market faster
  2. High network bandwidth availability
  3. Performance engineers are in place
• Productivity
  1. Productivity of organization get improved as they no longer need to worry about patches / updates, server maintenance, all these responsibilities are of cloud providers
  2. Productivity improves when users of organizations works simultaneously over the data
  3. Productivity of users/employees also improves by flexibility to work from anywhere since cloud providers makes data available globally

What is IaaS

• Infrastructure-as-a-service
• Cloud computing service that offers essential compute, storage and networking resources on demand, on a pay-as-you-go basis
• Cloud computing service providers manages infrastructure
• Benifits:
  1. Reduces maintainance of on-premises infrstructure / hardware / datacenters / physical servers
  2. Cost savings – Saves money of hardware cost
  3. Scaling up and down resources on demand
  4. High availiability
  5. With respective service agreements in place, cloud computing service provider can provide better security

What is PAAS

1. Platform as a service
2. Cloud computing service that provides on-demand environment for developing, testing, delivering and managing software applications
3. PaaS sevice provides framework for developers where they will be worry free about Infrastructure, OS, mainatainance and can foucs on business logic
4. All servers (including Storage and Networking) managed by Cloud computing service provider
5. Example : Windows Azure, OpenShift

What is SAAS

1. Software as a service (Cloud application services)
2. Cloud computing service for delivering software applications over Internet mostly on subscription basis
3. Cloud computing service provider host and manages the software applications
4. Cloud computing service provider handles everything including maintainance, softwere upgrade and security patches
5. Example : Gmail fro Google, M365 from Microsoft, Dropbox, Salesforce, GoToMeeting etc.

Describe different types deployment models for cloud computing

• Public Cloud
  1. Public clouds are managed by cloud service providers
  2. These cloud service providers provide cloud computing resources like servers, storage, databases and so on over the public Internet
  3. Whole infrastructure is managed and owned by cloud service providers. That means everything runs on cloud providers hardware
  4. Data of organization remains in data center of cloud service providers
  5. High scale-able module, no need to worry about scaling up and scaling down of cloud computing resources. Infinitely scalable
  6. Cost as per use basis, no extra cost.
  7. Organization is not responsible for maintenance.
  8. Most common deployment model
  9. Best Example: Microsoft Azure – Here Microsoft as cloud service provider and we access all azure services through browser
  10. Common use cases: Hosting blog site, or web application.
• Private Cloud
  1. Service offered by private cloud either over the Internet or private internal network and only selected users rather to all public
  2. Data in private cloud mostly located in Organizations data-center or any third-party service provider to host their private-cloud
  3. This type of cloud also called internal or corporate cloud
  4. Private cloud provides higher level of security /strong control by using company firewalls and internal hosting makes sure that organization data / applications are not accessible to outside
  5. Cloud computing services are for specific organization those are not shared among the multiple organizations
• Hybrid Cloud
  1. Public cloud + Private cloud
  2. Organization data / applications are shared between Public cloud and Private cloud
  3. Hybrid cloud gives flexibility to the organizations by allowing to share data / application in between, more options are
  4. Here, organizations have a flexibility to use Public cloud for basic and non-sensitive data / tasks (e.g. – Organizations Intranet) and business critical information is in private cloud.

If you feel some other topics, need to be included in this collection kindly please share or put in comment box. We will definitely include / discuss

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