INTRODUCTION TO CLOUD

Key emerging tech like

-AI

-IOT

-Block Chain

-Analytics

works with massive amt of data and need huge storage space and computational power.

->for these tech,cloud is the only viable platform.

Public cloud service market expected to grow to 331.2 billion by 2022.

MODULE 1

 Cloud computing/Cloud-the delivery of on-demand computing resources-everything from

applns to data centers-over the internet on a pay for use basis
 NIST defines cloud computing- a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network
access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly
provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider
interaction.

Examples of computing resources:

1.n/ws

2.servers

3.storage

4.applications

5.services

CLOUD MODEL composed of

-5 essential characteristics

-3 deployment models

-3 service models
5 ESSENTIAL CHARACTERISTICS

1. on-demand self-service,

2. broad network access,

3.resource pooling,  is what gives cloud providers economies of scale, which they pass
on to their customers, making cloud cost-efficient.Using a multi-tenant model,
computing resources are pooled to serve multiple consumers; cloud resources are
dynamically assigned and reassigned, according to demand, without customers needing
to concern themselves with the physical location of these resources.
 4.rapid elasticity,

5.and measured service.

Cloud computing is abt utilizing tech as a service(Caas). Leveraging remote systems on-
demand over the open internet, scaling up and scaling back, and paying for what you use.
t is a revolution in that it has changed the way the world consumes compute services

by making them more cost-efficient while also making organizations more agile in responding

to changes in their markets.

3 CLOUD DEPLOYMENT MODEL

1.Public cloud is when you leverage cloud services over the open internet on hardware owned by

the cloud provider, but its usage is shared by other companies.

2.Private cloud means that the cloud infrastructure is provisioned for exclusive use by a single

organization.It could run on-premises or it could be owned, managed, and operated by a service
provider.

3.And when you use a mix of both public and private clouds, working together seamlessly,

that is classified as the Hybrid model.

3 SERVICE MODELS

based on the three layers in a computing stack - Infrastructure, Platform, and Applications.
These cloud computing models are aptly referred to as

-Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas),

-Platform as a Service (PaaS), and

-Software as a Service (SaaS).

In an Infrastructure as a Service model, you get access to infrastructure and physical

computing resources such as servers, networking, storage, and data center space - without the

need to manage or operate them.

In a Platform as a Service model, you get access to the platform, that is the hardware

and software tools, usually those needed to develop and deploy applications to users over

the Internet.

Software as a Service is a software licensing and delivery model in which software and applications

are centrally hosted and licensed on a subscription basis, and sometimes also referred to as "on-
demand

software."

HISTORY AND EVOLUTION OF CLOUD COMPUTING

Cloud computing is an evolution of technology over time.

The concept of cloud computing dates to the 1950s when large-scale mainframes with high-
volume processing power became available.

In order to make efficient use of the computing power of mainframes, the practice of time

sharing, or resource pooling, evolved.

Using dumb terminals, whose sole purpose was to facilitate access to the mainframes, multiple

users were able to access the same data storage layer and CPU power from any terminal.
In the 1970s, with the release of an operating system called Virtual Machine (VM), it became

possible for mainframes to have multiple virtual systems, or virtual machines, on a single

physical node.

The virtual machine operating system evolved the 1950s application of shared access of

a mainframe by allowing multiple distinct compute environments to exist on the same

physical hardware.

Each virtual machine hosted guest operating systems that behaved as though they had their

own memory, CPU, and hard drives, even though these were shared resources.
Virtualization thus became a technology driver and a huge catalyst for some of the biggest

evolutions in communications and computing.

Even 20 years ago, physical hardware was quite expensive.

With the internet becoming more accessible, and the need to make hardware costs more viable,

servers were virtualized into shared hosting environments, virtual private servers, and

virtual dedicated servers, using the same types of functionality provided by the virtual

machine operating system.

So, for example, if a company needed ‘x’ number of physical systems to run their applications,

they could take one physical node and split it into multiple virtual systems.

This was enabled by hypervisors.

A hypervisor is a small software layer that enables multiple operating systems to run

alongside each other, sharing the same physical computing resources.

A hypervisor also separates the Virtual Machines logically, assigning each its own slice of

the underlying computing power, memory, and storage, preventing the virtual machines from

interfering with each other.

So, if, for example, one operating system suffers a crash or a security compromise,

the others keep working.

As technologies and hypervisors improved and were able to share and deliver resources reliably,

some companies decided to make the cloud’s benefits accessible to users who didn’t

have an abundance of physical servers to create their own cloud computing infrastructure.

Since the servers were already online, the process of spinning up a new instance was

instantaneous.

Users could now order cloud resources they needed from a larger pool of available resources,

and they could pay for them on a per-use basis, also known as Pay-As-You-Go.

This pay-as-you-go or utility computing model became one of the key drivers behind cloud

computing taking off.

The pay-per-use model allowed companies and even individual developers to pay for the

computing resources as and when they used them, just like units of electricity.

This allowed them to switch to a more cash-flow friendly OpEx model from a CapEx model.
This model appealed to all sizes of companies, those who had little or no hardware, and even

those that had lots of hardware, because now, instead of making huge capital expenditures

in hardware, they could pay for compute resources as and when needed.

It also allowed them to scale their workloads during usage peaks, and scale down when usage

subsided.

And this gave rise to modern-day cloud computing.

The impact of the evolution of the cloud has been immense.

Key Considerations for Cloud Computing

Every organization’s transformation journey is unique, and therefore every organization’s

cloud adoption strategy is also unique to them.

Agility,
flexibility,

and competitiveness are key drivers for moving to the cloud, provided

it is done without creating business disruption or issues related to security, compliance,

and performance.

Let’s look at some key considerations that organizations can use as a guide while working

through their cloud strategy.

The first consideration is infrastructure and workloads.

-The cost of building and operating data centers can become astronomical.

-On the other hand, low initial costs and pay-as-you-go attributes of cloud computing can add up to

significant cost savings.

-Also, a point to consider is that not all workloads may be ready for the cloud, as-is.

The second consideration is around SaaS and development platforms.

-Organizations need to consider if paying for application access is a more viable option

than purchasing off-the-shelf software and subsequently investing in upgrades.

Organizations also need to consider speed and productivity—what it means for them

to get a new application up and running in ‘x’ hours on the cloud versus a couple

of weeks, even months on traditional platforms.

-And the person-hour cost efficiencies they gain from using cloud dashboards, real-time

statistics, and active analytics.

Lastly, organizations need to consider the impact of making a wrong decision—their

risk exposure.

Is it riskier, for example, for them to invest in the hardware and software or rent by the

hour?

Is it safer for them to work on a 12-month plan to build, write, test, and release the

code if they’re uncertain about adoption?

And is it better for them to “try” something new paying-as-you-go rather than making long-term

decisions based on little or no trial or adoption?

BENEFITS OF CLOUD ADOPTION

Let’s look at some of the benefits of cloud adoption, categorized broadly into Flexibility,

Efficiency, and Strategic Value.

1.Cloud gives us flexibility.

-Users can scale back or scale up services to fit their needs, customize applications,

-and access cloud services from anywhere with an internet connection.

-Cloud infrastructure scales on demand to support fluctuating workloads.

-Organizations can determine their level of control with as-a-service options.

-Users can select from a menu of pre-built tools and features to build a solution that

fits their specific needs.

-And Virtual Private Clouds, encryption, and API keys help keep data secure.

2.Cloud also brings great efficiency.

-Enterprise users can get applications to market quickly without worrying about underlying

infrastructure costs or its maintenance.

-Cloud-based applications and data are accessible from virtually any internet-connected device.

-Hardware failures do not result in data loss because of networked backups.

-Cloud computing uses remote resources, saving organizations the cost of servers and other

equipment, and paying on use-basis.

3.Strategic Value

-Cloud services give enterprises a competitive advantage by providing the most innovative

technologies available while managing the underlying infrastructure, thus enabling organizations

to focus on their priorities.

CHALLENGES OF CLOUD ADOPTION

-While cloud brings great opportunity, it also introduces challenges for business leaders

and IT departments.

-Some of these perceived risks include:

-Data security, associated with loss or unavailability

of data causing business disruption;

-Governance and sovereignty issues;

-Legal, regulatory, and compliance issues;

-Lack of standardization in how the constantly evolving technologies integrate and interoperate; -
Choosing the right deployment and service models to serve specific needs;

- Partnering with the right cloud service providers;

-Concerns related to business continuity and disaster recovery.

Organizations can no longer think of cloud adoption as something that is to be looked

at in the future.

With the right cloud adoption strategies, technologies, services, and service providers,

these risks can be mitigated.

Key Cloud Service Providers and Their Services

Let’s look at some numbers and predictions that help us see the scale cloud is predicted

to achieve in the coming years.

Gartner predicts:

The worldwide public cloud service market

to grow from $182.4 B in 2018 to $331.2 B in 2022, attaining

a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.6%.

Spending on Infrastructure-as-a-Service to increase from $30.5 B in 2018

to $76.6 B in 2022, growing 27.5% in a year.

Platform-as-a-Service spending to grow from $15.6 B in 2018 to $31.8B

2022, growing 21.8% in a year.

With software investments shifting from cloud-first to cloud-only, spending on Sofware-as-a-

Service is expected to grow from $80 B in 2018 to $143.7 B in 2022.
What is clear is that cloud is accelerating faster than predicted, adoption is high, and

revenues are soaring.

The question for businesses today is no longer “if” they need to adopt the cloud, rather

“what” their cloud adoption strategy should be to best serve their businesses and customers.

Keeping up with this technological wave, and driving it forward, are the Cloud Service

Providers with a wide range of services.

CLOUD SERVICE PROVIDERS

1.ALIBABA CLOUD

also known as Aliyun,

while relatively new, is the largest Chinese cloud computing service provider.

Aliyun provides a comprehensive suite of global cloud computing services to power not just

their customers’ online businesses but also the Alibaba Group’s own e-commerce ecosystem.

It offers a host of products and services such as

-compute,

-network,

-storage,

-security,

-monitoring and managing, communication,

- analytics,

-IoT,

-application development, -

data migration,

web hosting, and more.

2. Amazon Web Services

 One of the first to enter the cloud computing space

 AWS Cloud

 offers an extensive range of Infrastructure and Platform services to individuals, companies,

and governments on a metered pay-as-you-go basis.

 The Amazon Cloud provides a wide range of products, services, and solutions ranging

from Compute, DevOps, Data, Analytics, IoT, Machine Learning, Networking, Content Delivery,

Robotics, Serverless Computing, and much more.

3. Google Cloud Platform(GCP)

 a suite of cloud computing services, providing Infrastructure,

Platform, and Serverless Computing environments.

 Google also uses GCP internally for their end-user products such as Google Search and

YouTube.

 Google Cloud includes G Suite with products for communication, productivity, collaboration,

storage, and more.

 The Google App Engine is a platform for developing and hosting web applications in Google-
managed data centers, automatically allocating and de-allocating resources to handle demand.

4.IBM Cloud

 a full stack cloud platform that spans public, private, and hybrid environments

with products and services covering compute, network, storage, management, security, DevOps,
and databases.

 Some of their prominent offerings include their Bare Metal Servers, VMWare, Cloud Paks

for Application Modernization, Virtual Private Cloud, and the suite of emerging technologies

such as AI, IoT, Blockchain, Data and Analytics.

 With the acquisition of Red Hat, IBM is also positioning itself as the leading hybrid cloud

provider of our times.

5. Microsoft Azure

 a flexible cloud platform for building, testing, deploying, and managing

applications and services through Microsoft-managed data centers.

 With its data centers spread out in many regions, Azure provides a global reach with a local

presence.

 It provides Software, Platform, and Infrastructure services supporting Microsoft-specific and

third-party languages, tools, and frameworks.

6.Oracle cloud

 primarily known for Software as a Service and Database as a Service (also

known as the Oracle Data Cloud).

 Oracle’s SaaS offering includes wide-ranging applications such as ERP, SCM, HCM, Marketing,

Sales, and CX running in the cloud.

 And the Oracle Data Cloud provides one of the largest cloud-based data management platforms

helping customers personalize their online, offline, and mobile marketing campaigns, for

targeted audiences.

 Oracle Cloud also provides some cloud Infrastructure and Platform services.

7.Salesforce

 Salesforce specializes in their Software as a Service offering that focuses on customer

relationship management, supporting businesses to better connect with their customers, partners,

and potential customers.

 Salesforce offers multiple cloud services such as Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing

Cloud, helping customers track analytics in real-time, customer success and support, customer

complaints, even listening in to customers across social platforms to automatically route

them to appropriate agents for resolution.

8.SAP
 SAP is known for Enterprise software and applications such as ERP, CRM, HR, and Finance,
running

in the cloud.

There is also an SAP Cloud Platform for building and extending business applications with rapid

innovation cycles in a secure cloud computing environment managed by SAP.

Module 2-Cloud Adoption and Emerging Technologies

CLOUD ADOPTION- NO LONGER A CHOICE

Cloud adoption is no longer a thing of the future.

From a single individual to a global multi-billion-dollar enterprise, anybody can access the
computing capacity they need on the cloud.

The lag time from decision to value is no longer a journey of years with high upfront

capital; cloud makes it possible for businesses to experiment, fail, and learn much faster

than ever before, with low risk exposure.

Businesses today have greater freedom to change course than to live with the consequences

of expensive decisions taken in the past.

According to an IBM Institute for Business Value study, more than three-quarters of enterprises

today are using cloud computing to expand into new industries.

74% have adopted cloud to improve customer experience; and 71% use cloud to create enhanced

products and services—while simultaneously downsizing legacy systems and reducing costs.

To remain competitive, businesses need to be able to respond quickly to marketplace

changes, use analytics to understand customer experience, and apply that understanding to

adapt their products and services based on what they learn.

Product lifecycles have shortened, and barriers to entry have become lower.

Today’s enablers for growth, agility, and innovation include:

-Cognitively-enabled workflows,

-Applied exponential technologies such as AI, Automation, IoT, and Blockchain,

-Applications that span new and legacy solutions; and

-dOpen hybrid and secure Multicloud infrastructures.

The power, scalability, flexibility, and pay-as-you-go economics of cloud provides the foundation

for this transformation.

The International Data Corporation, IDC, predicts that by 2025, the total amount of digital

data created worldwide will rise to 163 zettabytes (where one zettabyte is equivalent to a trillion
gigabytes).

And 30% of this data will be real-time information.

Considering the unprecedented amounts of data being produced daily, and the ability to make

data-driven decisions crucial to any business, cloud computing becomes essential for businesses

to succeed, sustain, and compete in today’s markets.

A cloud strategy, more than just an IT strategy, is the core component of any business strategy

today.

Businesses that haven’t already, or are not currently, integrating cloud into their

business strategy, run the risk of lacking the speed, agility, innovation, and decision-making

capacities needed to be competitive, as also their ability to respond to digital disruption.

CLOUD ADOPTION- Case Studies

1.American Airlines

Challenges:

-Improve customer experience and digital channels

-Improve response time to customer needs

Solution:

a new technology platform and a new approach to development that would help it deliver digital
self-service tools and customer value more rapidly across its enterprise.

The airline recognized the opportunity to remove the constraints of their existing customer-facing

applications based on monolithic code into cloud-native based microservices architecture

on the cloud.

Results:

-Faster development and release of new apps.

-Improved operational reliability, productivity, and end customer response times.

-Cost savings by avoiding existing upgrade costs via migration to the IBM Cloud.

2.UBANK

REMOVING BARRIERS TO INNOVATION:

Result

3.Bitly

DEMAND FOR ENTERPRISE SCALE

Since its inception in 2008, Bitly has journeyed

from a startup that offered intelligent link-shortening technology adopted by users to compress
lengthy

URLs for social media posts, to an enterprise product.

Seeking an agile, cost-effective IT infrastructure to support this transition, Bitly started

planning for cloud migration.

Their need was to have a cloud-based model with pay-as-you-go pricing, the ability to

scale up and scale down, a more global presence, and the ability to geodistribute into more
POPs.

And they wanted it to be low-risk.

Bitly migrated to an IBM Cloud environment, establishing a scalable hosting platform for

low-latency delivery to enterprise customers around the world.

The results: 25 billion data-infused links migrated from

one hosting site to Cloud infrastructure with data center locations worldwide.

1 billion user interaction data set stored and managed in a flexible, cost-effective

Cloud Object Storage environment.

Transformed IT operations to scale for growth, control costs and focus valuable resources

on new product development.

4.ACTIVTRADES-Accelerating growth

Financial traders demand extreme speed and

availability from trading systems.

Profitability depends on split-second decisions.

As a leading online broker in forex, commodities, equities, cryptocurrencies, indices, and other

financial instruments, ActivTrades enables investors to buy and sell on numerous financial

markets.

Investors need reliable access to accurate market information, combined with the ability

to move rapidly to execute trades.

As its client base grew, ActivTrades wanted to cut latency, accelerate execution, and

streamline the delivery of new functions.

ActivTrades migrated three major trading systems from on-premises infrastructure to IBM Cloud

for VMware solutions, backed by data storage, networking, and security offerings on the

IBM Cloud.

The results: Up to 3X performance boost, helping clients

seize fleeting opportunities for profit.

1. Security-rich cloud platform with ultra-high availability protects client investments.

2. Hours, not days to fire up new resources, for faster response to emerging
requirements
IOT in CLOUD

giant network of connected things and people that have changed much of how we
live our daily lives - from the way we drive, to how we make purchases,

monitoring our personal health, and even how we get energy for our homes.

Smart devices and sensors are continuously tracking and collecting data. For example,

a smart building could have thousands of sensors measuring all kinds of data

related to thermal, optical, structural, and environmental stimuli.

An unprecedented amount of data is being generated, putting a tremendous strain on

the Internet. That is where the cloud comes in, by

connecting the IoT device user to the cloud - be it for device registration,

device identity, storing data, or accessing enterprise data.

 Data collected through IoT devices is stored and processed on the cloud since IoT devices

can be in a state of motion, the cloud serves as a collection point in closest

proximity, minimizing the latency in reporting up the data points and

providing a response back to the IoT application.

So, from IOT platforms running entirely on the cloud to the interfaces used by

customers to interact these devices, to the backend analytics

platforms - cloud computing supports and enables IoT.

Cloud service providers also offer specialized IoT services designed to help speed up the
development of IoT solutions.

Let's look at a case study that demonstrates the use of the IoT on

the cloud to combat the poaching of endangered rhinos at Welgevonden by

making poaching predictable.

The rhinos have become one of the the key species that is becoming endangered due

to poaching throughout Africa. But now especially in South Africa.

Up until now, poachers have been increasing in numbers, and they become

more militarized with weapons. And so of course we've had to do the same. This is

not sustainable. The only way to do this better, is to bring in technology and

things that they do not have. This endangered species is getting help from

some unexpected friends, the zebra and antelope. They're wearing IoT sensors

connected to the IBM cloud. When poachers enter the area, the animals run for it,

which alerts Rangers who can track their emotions and help stop them before any

harm is done. It's a smart way to help increase the Rhino population and turn
the poachers into the endangered species

AI on CLOUD

Making sense of the endless streams of data is where Artificial Intelligence, or AI,
comes in.

--> Many of the applications where we apply AI today simply wouldn't have been
possible without the scalable, on-demand computing offered by the cloud.

There is a three-way relationship between AI, IoT, and Cloud.

Just as AI consumes the data produced by IoT devices, the IoT devices’ behavior can be

dictated based on responses from AI.

For example, Smart Assistants, a common type of IoT device, continues to learn about
the user’s preferences as usage grows, such as the songs they like, their home
temperature settings, preferred meal times, and over time they anticipate their actions
based on the user’s past history.

So, what we see is a symbiotic relationship between IoT, AI, and Cloud.

IoT delivers the data, AI powers the insights, and both these emerging technologies
leverage cloud’s scalability and processing power to provide value to individuals and
businesses alike.

Let’s look at how the United States Tennis Association, USTA, is using AI on the Cloud

to deliver unique digital experiences to millions of fans around the world.

For two weeks at the end of every summer, tennis fans around the world turn their eyes

to New York city, and the US Open.

Hundreds of thousands onsite, and millions more online.

But where you see tennis, IBM sees data;

the scores and statistics, the sights, the sounds.

IBM integrates and analyzes the data flowing from the court.

And delivers unique digital experiences to more than ten million tennis fans around the
world.

And we do it all in the IBM Cloud.

The IBM Cloud is the digital foundation of the US Open.

It scales rapidly to meet a five thousand percent increase in web traffic.

And it delivers a consistant experience to our fans all around the globe.

And with Watson on the IBM Cloud, we can engage fans in unique ways, year after year.

Slam Tracker analyzes more than twenty-six million historical data points.

It gives fans deep insight into featured matches, and it can see the momentum of a
match shifting in real time.

AI Highlights uses Watson to process thousands of hours of US Open video.

It can hear the cheers of the crowd.

It can see a player celebrating.

And it knows what makes a great tennis highlight.

And this year we're putting the power of AI Highlights into the hands of US players and

coaches.

Watson is analyzing match video,

so coaches can quickly find the footage they need to guide the development of their
players.

And if you need to know where to park, find a good burger, or grab the latest US Open

gear, you can find the answers with the Guest Information feature in the US Open app

and mobile web, using Watson.

We work with IBM because they keep us on the cutting edge of the fan experience.

They help us to adopt the latest technology, like Cloud and AI.
 And they bring data to life in a way that's accessible and engaging for our fans.
Blockchain on cloud

Blockchain is a secure, distributed, open technology that can help speed up

processes, lower costs, and build transparency and traceability in

transactional applications.

 It is an immutable Network allowing members to

view only those transactions that are relevant to them.

The more open, diverse, and distributed the network, the stronger the trust and transparency in
the data and transactions.

85% of businesses today rely on multiple clouds to meet their IT

needs, with more than 70% using more than three. These businesses need to be able

to move applications and data across multiple clouds easily and securely,

leading to the emerging demand to build and manage business applications such as

blockchain for the multi cloud environment.

Blockchain and AI, much like

IoT and AI, powered by the cloud, also have a three-way relationship. Where

blockchain technology provides the trusted, decentralized source of truth, AI

powers the analytics and decision-making from the data collected, and cloud

provides globally distributed, scalable, and cost-efficient computing resources

to support both the unprecedented amounts of data being collected and the

processing power required to draw insights from this data.

Blockchain serves to make AI more understandable by recording the data and variables that go

into a decision made in an AI algorithm, leading to greater trust and

transparency in the conclusions and decisions made by these algorithms.

Analytics on cloud

Analytics technologies on the cloud leverage the flexibility, scalability, and

computing resources available on the cloud.

From tracking trends on social

media to predict future events, to analyzing data to build machine learning

models that can be deployed in cognitive applications, cloud provides the

integrated environment that is required to leverage data for continuous

improvement and accelerated business growth.

Let's look at how KONE has

invested in cloud and IoT technologies to power a data analytics and predictive

maintenance solution for city infrastructure used by more than 1

billion people daily. At KONE we manufacture elevators, escalators, auto

walks, and doors All of these devices are streams of data that we are collecting.

In order to process those streams, we need a scalable way of handling the amount

of data that is coming in. And that's where cloud function fits in perfectly.

We handle that data with event-driven architecture. We use functions to persist

that data, and to generate further events on that data, that are then utilized and

consumed by applications, our customers and users. In our analytics

platform, we analyzed the set of data and we generate value predictive in a sense

that we can predict the failure rate to a certain percentage that is about to

happen in the future for our equipment. And this allows us to perform predictive

maintenance. And this is kind of the whole concept that we have behind our

24/7 connected services, which is a promise to our customers. That the

equipment is connected to the cloud and we are monitoring it. And that's where we

generate the real a value for our customers. At the

moment we use almost all aspects of the IBM cloud. We use storage from the cloud.

We use cloud function. We use messaging services. We

use IoT services. So a number of services already in use and platform. And that use

will only grow as our digital footprint in the industry grows.

Module 3:

CLOUD COMPUTING SERVICE MODELS

Overview
IAAS- IaaS is a set of compute

networking and storage resources that have been virtualized by a vendor so

that a user can access and configure them any way they want. the persona for IaaS

is a system admin, or an IT admin.

SAAS- Software as a Service is just software that you

don't have to install on your machine and you don't have to manually update.

And so the user for Software as a Service could be anyone. In fact, if you're

watching this on YouTube right now, then you're a user of Software as a Service.

It's usually charged on a subscription model rather than a one-time license fee.

PAAS-PaaS takes advantage of all the

virtualized resources from Iaas and then just abstracts them away, so the

user doesn't have to worry about managing any of those virtualized

resources. The user for PaaS is not a system admin, usually. It's usually a dev.

 the pyramid metaphor,

is meant to indicate that as you move down, you're increasing complexity in

terms of your knowledge and management of infrastructure resources.

And you're increasing the ease of use.

in terms of cloud computing and its three service models

-IaaS the cloud provider manages the

physical resources, data centers, cooling power, Network and security, as well as

computing resources that include servers and storage.

-With PaaS, the provider, in

addition to the computing resources, also manages the platform infrastructure

which includes the operating systems, development tools, databases, and business

analytics.

-In the SaaS model, in addition to the infrastructure and the platform

resources, the provider also hosts and manages the applications and data.

IAAS-INFRASTRUCTURE AS A SERVICE

-is a form of cloud computing that delivers fundamental compute, network, and storage

resources to consumers on-demand, over the internet, on a pay-as-you-go basis.

The cloud provider hosts the infrastructure components traditionally present in an on-premises

data center as well as the virtualization or hypervisor layer.

In an IaaS Cloud environment,

-customers can create or provision virtual machines (or VMs)

in their choice of Region and Zone available from the Cloud Provider.

These VMs typically come pre-installed the customer’s choice of operating system.

The customers can then deploy middleware, install applications, and run workloads on

these VMs.

They can also and create storage for their workloads and backups.

Cloud providers often provide customers the ability to track and monitor the performance

and usage of their cloud services and manage disaster recovery.

Let’s look at the key components of cloud infrastructure:

1.Physical data centers: IaaS providers manage large data centers that contain the physical

machines required to power the various layers of abstraction on top of them.

In most IaaS models, end users do not interact directly with the physical infrastructure

but experience it as a service provided to them.

2.Compute: IaaS providers manage the hypervisors and end-users programmatically provision virtual

instances with desired amounts of compute, memory, and storage resources.

Cloud compute typically comes with supporting services like auto scaling and load balancing

that provide scalability and high performance.

3.Network: Users get access to networking resources on the cloud through virtualization or
programmatically,

through APIs.

4.Storage: There are three types of cloud data storage: object, file, and block storage.

Object storage is the most common mode of storage in the cloud, given that it is highly

distributed and resilient.

IaaS supports a wide array of use cases.

We’ll look at some typical use cases here.

Organizations today are using cloud infrastructure services to enable their teams to set up test

and development environments faster, helping create new applications more quickly.

By abstracting the low-level components, cloud infrastructure is helping developers focus

more on business logic than infrastructure management.

Business continuity and disaster recovery require a significant amount of technology

and staff investments.

IaaS is helping organizations reduce this cost and make applications and data accessible

as usual during a disaster or outage.

Organizations are using cloud infrastructure to deploy their web applications faster and

also scale infrastructure up and down as demand fluctuates.

Organizations are leveraging the high-performance computing capabilities of cloud infrastructure

to solve complex problems involving millions of variables and calculations, such as climate

and weather predictions and financial modeling.

Mining massive data sets to locate valuable patterns, trends, and associations requires

a huge amount of processing power.

Cloud infrastructure not only provides the required high-performance computing but also

makes it economically viable.

While there are some concerns regarding the lack of transparency in the cloud infrastructure’s

configuration and management and dependency on a third-party for workload availability

and performance Infrastructure-as-a-Service is the fastest growing cloud model today.

PLATFORM AS A SERVICE

- a cloud computing model that provides customers a complete platform—hardware, software, and
infrastructure—to develop,deploy, manage, and run applications created by them or acquired from
a third-party.
->The PaaS provider hosts everything—servers, networks, storage, operating system, application

runtimes, APIs, middleware, databases, and other tools—at their data center.

The provider also takes responsibility for the installation, configuration, and operation

of the application infrastructure, leaving the user responsible for only the application

code and its maintenance.

Customers pay for this service on a usage basis and purchase resources on-demand.

With IaaS, the cloud provider offers access to ‘raw’ computing resources, such as

servers, storage, and networking, while the user is responsible for the platform and application

software.

With PaaS, the cloud service provider delivers and manages the entire platform infrastructure,

abstracting users from the lower-level details of the environment.

Let’s look at some essential characteristics of Platform-as-a-Service:

PaaS clouds are distinguished by the high level of abstraction they provide to the users,

eliminating the complexity of deploying applications, configuring infrastructure, and provisioning

and configuring supporting technologies like load balancers and databases.

PaaS clouds provide services and APIs that help simplify the job of developers in delivering

elastically scalable and highly available cloud applications.

These services typically include a variety of capabilities such as APIs for distributed
caching, queuing and messaging, file and data storage, workload management, user identity,

and analytics, thus eliminating the need to integrate disparate components.

The PaaS runtime environment executes end-user code according to policies set by the application

owner and cloud provider.

Many of the PaaS offerings provide developers with rapid deployment mechanisms, or “push

and run” mechanism, for deploying and running applications.

PaaS offerings support a range of application infrastructure (or middleware) capabilities,

such as application servers, database management systems, business analytics services, mobile

back-end services, integration services, business process management systems, rules engines,

and complex event processing systems.

Such an application infrastructure assists developers by reducing the amount of code

that must be written while expanding the application’s functional capabilities.

The most important use case for PaaS is strategic—build, test, deploy, enhance, and scale
applications rapidly and cost-effectively.

Let’s look at some more use cases for PaaS:

1.API development and management: Organizations

are using PaaS to develop, run, manage, and secure APIs and microservices, which are loosely

coupled, independently deployable components and services.

2.Internet of Things, or IoT: PaaS clouds support a broad range of application environments,

programming languages, and tools used for IoT deployments.

3.Business analytics/intelligence: PaaS tools allow organizations to analyze their data

to find business insights that enable more informed business decisions and predictions.

4.Business Process Management, or BPM: Organizations are using the PaaS cloud to access BPM
platformdelivered as a service.

5.Master data management, or MDM: Organizations are leveraging the PaaS cloud to provide a

single point of reference for critical business data such as information about customer transactions

and analytical data to support decision making.

Let’s look at some advantages of using PaaS:

1.Scalability, made possible because of the

rapid allocation and deallocation of resources with a pay-as-you-use model offered by PaaS.

The APIs, support services, and middleware capabilities that PaaS clouds provide assist

developers in focusing their efforts on application development and testing, resulting in faster
time to market for their products and services.

2.Middleware capabilities also reduce the amount of code that needs to be written while expanding

the application’s functional capabilities.

3.Greater agility and innovation because using PaaS platforms means that you can experiment

with multiple operating systems, languages, and tools without having to invest in these

resources.

4.You can evaluate and prototype ideas with very low risk exposure resulting in faster,

easier, less-risky adoption of a wider range of resources.

5.Some of the key PaaS offerings available in the market today include AWS Elastic Beanstalk,

Cloud Foundry on IBM Cloud, IBM Cloud Paks, Windows Azure, RedHat OpenShift, Magento
Commerce Cloud, Force.com, and Apache Stratos.

PaaS clouds do come with some risks—risks that all cloud offerings have in general,

such as information security threats and dependency on the service provider’s infrastructure.

Services can get impacted when a service provider’s infrastructure experiences downtime.

Customers also don’t have any direct control over the changes that may take place when

a provider makes changes in its strategy, service offerings, or tools.

But the benefits can far outweigh these risks—PaaS continues to experience strong growth and

is predicted to become the prevailing platform delivery model moving forward.

SAAS

 a cloud offering that provides

users with access to a service provider’s cloud-based software.

SaaS providers maintain the servers, databases, and code that constitute an application.

They also manage access to the application, including security, availability, and performance.

Applications reside on a remote cloud network, and users use these applications without having

to maintain and update the infrastructure.

Core business processes supported by SaaS today / include

email and collaboration via offerings such as Microsoft's Office 365 and Google's Gmail,

Customer Relationship Management via services such as NetSuite CRM and Salesforce,

Human Resource Management via services from Workday and SAP SuccessFactors,

financial management, billing and collaboration, and many more.

According to Forrester Research, SaaS has overtaken on-premises solutions in categories

such as human capital management (HCM), customer relationship management (CRM), and
collaboration.

Solutions once available with several different deployment options are now SaaS-only.

Let’s look at key characteristics of Software-as-a-Service:

 SaaS clouds have a multitenant architecture.

Infrastructure and code are maintained centrally and accessed by all users.

SaaS makes it easy for users to manage privileges, monitor data use, and ensure everyone sees

the same information at the same time.

Security, compliance, and maintenance are all part of the offering.

Users can customize applications to fit their business processes with point-and-click ease.

Users can customize the UI to work with their branding guidelines; they can modify data

fields and enable or disable features within the business process.

These customizations are preserved through upgrades.

Users pay for the use of the services via a subscription model.

The use of resources can be scaled easily, depending on service needs.

Key benefits of adopting SaaS:

1.Businesses can directly procure solutions

without upfront capital and assistance from IT, greatly reducing the time from decision

to value from months to days.

2.SaaS greatly increases workforce productivity and efficiency.

3.Users can access core business apps from wherever they; they can also buy and deploy apps in

minutes reducing the typical obstacles enterprises have to to test the products they they might

use.

4.Using SaaS applications, individuals and small enterprises can spread out their software

costs over time.

Let’s look at some use cases for SaaS: Organizations are moving to SaaS for their

core business needs as part of their strategic transformation to reduce on-premises IT infrastructure

and reduce capital expenditure.

Oragnzaitions are leveraging SaaS to avoid the need for ongoing upgrades, maintenance,

and patching, done traditionally by internal IT resources; applications run reliably with

minimal input, for example, email servers and office collaboration and productivity
tools.

Organizations are increasingly opting for SaaS eCommerce Platforms to manage their websites,

marketing, sales, and operations.

With SaaS, organizations are able to take advantage of the resilience and business continuity

of the cloud provider.

Enterprises are now developing SaaS integration platforms (or SIPs) for building additional

SaaS applications, moving SaaS beyond standalone software functionality to a platform for mission-
critical

applications.

SaaS does evoke some concerns, as well.

Primary among them being data ownership and data safety.

Security is an important consideration when you’re allowing a third-party to maintain

business-critical data.

And application access relies on a good internet connection—if you’re not connected, you

cannot access the apps.

But the benefits far outweigh the concerns, with SaaS making up the largest segment of

the cloud market today.

DEPLOYMENT MODELS

Deployment models indicate where the infrastructure resides, who owns and manages it, and
how cloud resources and services are made available to users.

PUBLIC CLOUD

In a public cloud model, users get access to servers, storage, network, security, and

applications as services delivered by cloud service providers over the internet.

Using web consoles and APIs, users can provision the resources and services they need.

The cloud provider owns, manages, provisions, and maintains the infrastructure, renting

it out to customers either for a subscription charge or usage-based fee.

Users don’t own the servers their applications run on or storage their data consumes, or

manage the operations of the servers, or even determine how the platforms are maintained.

In very much the same way that we consume and pay for utilities such as water, electricity,

or gas in our everyday lives, we don’t own any of these cloud resources—we make an

agreement with the service provider, use the resources, and pay for what we use within
a certain period.

Public clouds offer significant cost savings as the provider bears all the capital, operational,

and maintenance expenses for the infrastructure and the facilities they are hosted in.

It makes scalability as easy as requesting more capacity.

However, with a public cloud, the user does not have any control over the computing
environment and is subject to the performance and security of the cloud provider’s infrastructure.

There are several public cloud providers in the market today, such as Amazon Web Services,

Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, Google Cloud Platform, and Alibaba Cloud.

While all providers include a common set of core services, such as servers, storage, network,

security, and databases, they also offer a wide spectrum of niche services with varied

payment options.

Let’s talk about some of the characteristics of a public cloud:

A public cloud is a virtualized multi-tenant architecture enabling tenants or users to

share computing resources, residing outside their firewalls.

The cloud providers pool of resources, including infrastructure, platforms, and software, are

NOT dedicated for use by a single tenant or organization.

Resources are distributed on an as-needed basis offered through a variety of subscription

and pay-as-you-go models.

Public clouds have significant benefits; we’ll go over some of these benefits here:

Vast on-demand resources are available, allowing applications to respond seamlessly to

fluctuations in demand.

Considering the large number of users that share the centralized cloud resources on-demand,

the public cloud offers the most significant economies of scale.

The sheer number of server and network resources available on the public cloud means that a

public cloud is highly reliable—if one physical component fails, the service still runs unaffected

on the remaining available components.

It’s also important to note some concerns users have regarding public clouds

—key among them being security and data sovereignty compliance.

Security issues such as data breaches, data loss, account hijacking, insufficient due

diligence, and system and application vulnerability seem to be some of the fears users continue

to have concerning security in the public cloud.

With data being stored in different locations and accessed across national borders, it has
also become increasingly critical for companies to be compliant with data sovereignty regulations

governing the storage, transfer, and security of data.

A service provider’s ability to not just keep up with the regulations, but also the

interpretation of these regulations, is a concern shared by many businesses.

Let’s look at some common use cases for public cloud:

Organizations are increasingly opting to access cloud-based applications and platforms so

their teams can focus on building and testing applications, and reducing time-to-market

for their products and services.

Businesses with fluctuating capacity and resourcing needs are opting for the public cloud.

Organizations are using public cloud computing resources to build secondary infrastructures

for disaster recovery, data protection, and business continuity.

More and more organizations are using cloud storage and data management services for greater

accessibility, easy distribution, and backing up their data.

IT departments are outsourcing the management of less critical and standardized business

platforms and applications to pubic cloud providers.

In the next video, we will look at the private cloud model, its features, benefits, and some

use cases.

PRIVATE CLOUD

The National Institute of Standards and Technology defines Private Cloud as cloud infrastructure

provisioned for exclusive use by a single organization comprising multiple consumers,

such as the business units within the organization.

It may be owned, managed, and operated by the organization, a third party, or some combination

of them, and it may exist on or off premises.”

Private cloud platforms can be implemented internally or externally.

When the platform is provisioned over an organization’s internal infrastructure, it runs on-
premises and is owned, managed, and operated by the organization.

When it is provisioned over a cloud provider’s infrastructure, it is owned, managed, and

operated by the service provider.

This external private cloud offering that resides on a cloud service provider’s infrastructure

is called a Virtual Private Cloud, or VPC.

A VPC is a public cloud offering that lets an organization establish its own private
and secure cloud-like computing environment in a logically isolated part of a shared public

cloud.

Using a VPC, organizations can leverage the dynamic scalability, high availability, and

lower cost of ownership of a public cloud, while having the infrastructure and security

tailored to the organization’s unique needs.

Virtual Private Clouds are offered by most Public Cloud providers such as IBM and Amazon.

A private cloud is a virtualized environment modeled to bring in the benefits of a public

cloud platform without the perceived disadvantages of an open and shared public platform.

Users of a private cloud, such as Developers and Business Units in an organization, still

get to leverage benefits such as economies of scale, granular scale, operational efficiencies,

and user self-service, while exercising full control over access, security, and compliances

specific to their organization and business.

Private clouds provide you with The ability to leverage the value of cloud

computing using systems that are directly managed or under perceived control of the

organization’s internal IT.

The ability to better utilize internal computing resources, such as the organization’s existing

investments in hardware and software, thereby reducing costs.

Better scalability through virtualization and “cloud bursting,” i.e., leveraging

public cloud instances for a period of time but returning to the private cloud when the

surge is met.

Controlled access and greater security measures customized to specific organizational needs.

The ability to expand and provision things in a relatively short amount of time, providing

greater agility.

Organizations may choose to opt for private cloud because of various reasons—because

their applications provide a unique competitive advantage, there are security and regulatory

concerns, or because the data is highly sensitive and subject to strict industry or governmental

regulations.

Let’s look at some common use cases for a private cloud:

A private cloud is an opportunity for organizations to modernize and unify their in-house and

legacy applications.

Moving these applications from their dedicated hardware to the cloud also allows them to
leverage the power of the compute resources and multiple services available on the cloud.

Using the private cloud, organizations are integrating data and application services

from their existing applications with public cloud services.

This allows them to leverage their private cloud’s compute capability for the larger

jobs while pulling data into an application on a private cloud to leverage public cloud

services—essentially opening their data centers to work with cloud services.

Application portability is a key feature of cloud platforms.

Using the private cloud gives organizations the flexibility to build applications anywhere,

and move them anywhere, without having to compromise security and compliance in the

process.

Some of the key reasons that may prevent an organization from moving to a public cloud

include security and regulatory concerns, and data sensitivity.

A private cloud offers these organizations the benefits of on-demand enterprise resources

while exercising full control over critical security and compliance issues from within

the environment of their dedicated cloud.

HYBRID CLOUD

Hybrid cloud is a computing environment that connects an organization’s on-premise private

cloud and third-party public cloud into a single, flexible infrastructure for running

the organization’s applications and workloads.

The mix of public and private cloud resources gives organizations the flexibility to choose

the optimal cloud for each application or workload.

Workloads move freely between the two clouds as needs change.

Organizations can choose to run the sensitive, highly-regulated, and mission-critical applications

or workloads with reasonably constant performance and capacity requirements on private cloud

infrastructure while deploying the less-sensitive and more-dynamic workloads on the public cloud.

With proper integration and orchestration between the public and private clouds, you

can leverage both clouds for the same workload.

For example, you can leverage additional public cloud capacity to accommodate a spike in
demand for a private cloud application (also known as “cloud bursting”).

The key tenets of a hybrid cloud are interoperability, scalability, and portability.

Hybrid cloud is interoperable—which means that the public and private cloud services
can understand each other’s APIs, configuration, data formats, and forms of authentication

and authorization.

When there is a spike in demand, a workload running on the private cloud can leverage

the additional public cloud capacity, making it scalable.

A hybrid cloud is also portable—since you’re no longer locked-in with a specific vendor,

you can move applications and data not just between on-premise and cloud systems, but

also between cloud service providers.

Hybrid is about taking the best of both worlds.

There are 2 common types of hybrid clouds:

1.Hybrid monocloud and Hybrid multicloud.

A hybrid monocloud is a hybrid cloud with one cloud provider, while a hybrid multicloud

is an open standards-based stack that can be deployed on any public cloud infrastructure.

The difference lies in the flexibility that the hybrid multicloud offers organizations

to move workloads and environments from one vendor to another.

There is also a variant of hybrid multicloud, called the composite multicloud, which makes

this flexibility even more granular as it distributes single applications across multiple

providers, allowing you to move application components across cloud services and vendors

as needed.

Hybrid cloud offers significant benefits in areas of security and compliance, scalability

and resilience, resource optimization and cost-saving.

A hybrid cloud lets organizations deploy highly regulated or sensitive workloads in a private

cloud while running the less-sensitive workloads on a public cloud.

Using a hybrid cloud, you can scale up quickly, inexpensively, and even automatically using

the public cloud infrastructure, all without impacting the other workloads running on your

private cloud.

Because you’re not locked-in with a specific vendor and also don’t have to make either-or

decisions between the different cloud models, you can make the most cost-efficient use of

your infrastructure budget.

You can maintain workloads where they are most efficient, spin-up environments using

pay-as-you-go in the public cloud, and rapidly adopt new tools as you need them.

A typical organization will have a range of applications and workloads spread across private,
public, and traditional IT environments.

This represents a range of opportunities for optimization via a hybrid cloud approach.

Let’s look at some increasingly common hybrid cloud use cases:

Software-as-a-Service integration.

Through hybrid integration, organizations are connecting Software-as-a-Service applications

available in the public cloud to their existing public cloud, private cloud, and traditional

IT applications to deliver new solutions.

Data and AI integration.

Organizations today are creating richer and more personal experiences by combining new

data sources on the public cloud—such as weather, social, the Internet of Things, CRM,

and ERP—with existing data and analytics, machine learning, and AI capabilities.

Enhancing legacy apps.

An increasing number of organizations are using public cloud services to upgrade the

user experience of their on-premises applications and deploy them globally to new devices, while

incrementally modernizing their core business systems.

VMware migration.

More and more organizations are “lifting and shifting” their on-premises virtualized

workloads to a public cloud without conversion or modification to reduce their on-premises

data center footprint and position themselves to scale without added capital expense.

Module 4

COMPONENTS OF CLOUD COMPUTING

CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE_OVERVIEW

After choosing the cloud service model and the cloud type offered by vendors, customers

need to plan the infrastructure architecture.

The infrastructure layer is the foundation of the cloud.

This layer consists of physical resources that are housed in Regions, Zones and Data

Centers.

A Cloud provider’s IT environment is typically distributed across many Regions around the

world.

A cloud Region, is a geographic area or location where a Cloud provider’s infrastructure

is clustered, and may have names like NA South or US East.

The cloud Regions are isolated from each other so that if one Region was impacted by a natural

disaster like an Earthquake, the Cloud operations in other Regions would keep running.

Each Cloud Region can have multiple Zones (or Availability Zones or AZ for short), which

are typically distinct Data Centers with their own power, cooling and networking resources.

These Zones can have names like DAL-09 or us-east-1.

The isolation of zones improves the cloud’s overall fault tolerance, decreases latency,

and avoids creating a single shared point of failure.

The Availability Zones (and DataCenters within them) are connected to other AZs and regions,

private datacenters and the Internet using very high bandwidth network connectivity.

A cloud Data center is a huge room or a warehouse containing cloud infrastructure.

These data centers contain pods and racks or standardized containers of computing resources

such as servers, as well as storage, and networking equipment - virtually everything that a physical

IT environment has.

Computing Resources:

Cloud providers offer several compute options

– Virtual Servers,

-Bare Metal Servers, and

-“Serverless” computing resources.

Most of the servers in a cloud datacenter run hypervisors to create virtual servers

or virtual machines (also called VMs for short), that are software-based computers, based on

virtualization technologies.

Other servers in the racks are bare metal servers that are physical servers that aren’t

virtualized.

Customers can provision VMs and Bare Metals servers as and when they need them and run

their workloads on them.

Cloud users can also run their workloads on serverless computing resources, which are

an abstraction layer on top of virtual machines.

Storage:
->Information and data can consist of files,

code, documents, images, videos, backups, snapshots, and databases and can be stored

in many different types of storage options on the Cloud.

->Bare Metal Servers and Virtual Servers are provisioned with default storage in local

drives.

->Since these cloud servers can be provisioned and decommissioned by customers on demand

and freed up for use by other users, any information stored in a local drive can be lost when you

delete or decommission a cloud server.

->However there are other storage options available on the cloud to persist data that you can

choose depending on factors like how important your data is, how quickly you want to be able

to access it, how often you access it, and how secure you need it to be.

->These additional storage options include Block storage, File storage, and Object storage.

->Block and file storage modes are commonly used in traditional data centers, but “often

struggle with scale, performance and distributed characteristics of cloud.”

->Object storage is the most common mode of storage in the cloud as it’s both highly

distributed and resilient.

Networking:

Networking infrastructure in a cloud datacenter

includes traditional networking hardware like routers and switches, but more importantly

for users of the Cloud, the Cloud providers have Software Defined Networking (or SDN)

options where certain networking resources are virtualized or made available programmatically,

through APIs.

This allows for easier network provisioning, configuration, and management in the cloud.

When servers in the cloud are provisioned, you need to setup their public and private

network interfaces.

The public network interfaces, as the name suggests, connect the servers to the public

internet, whereas the private ones provide connectivity to your other cloud resources

and help keep them secure.

As in the physical IT world, network interfaces in the cloud need to have IP addresses and

subnets either assigned automatically or configured.

In a cloud environment it is even more important to configure which network traffic and users

can access your resources, which can be done by setting up Security Groups and Access Control

Lists (or ACLs).

For further security and isolation of your resources in the cloud, most Cloud providers

provide Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs), Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), and Virtual

Private Networks (VPNs).

Some of the traditional hardware appliances such as firewalls, load balancers, gateways

and traffic analyzers can also be virtualized and made available as services in the cloud.

Another networking capability provided by the Cloud Providers is Content Delivery Networks

or CDNs, that distribute content to multiple points throughout the world so users accessing

the content can access it more quickly by getting it from a point nearest to them.

Cloud infrastructure is constantly advancing and improving.

Virtualization and Virtual Machines

virtualization is the process of creating a software based, or virtual, version of something,

whether that be compute, storage, networking, servers, or applications.

what makes virtualization feasible, is something called the hypervisor.

 hypervisor is, is it's simply a piece of software that runs above the physical server, or host.

What they do is essentially pull the

resources from the physical server and allocate them to your virtual

environments.

2 types

1.Type 1/Bare metal hypervisor=>is installed directly on top of the physical server.

=>frequently used type of hypervisors and they're most secure, they lower the

latency, and these are the ones that you'll see in the market the most. Some

examples would be VMware, ESXi, or Microsoft Hyper-v, or even open-source

KVM.

2.Type 2=>difference from type 1 is a layer of host OS that sits between the

physical server and the hypervisor. By that nature they are also called, Hosted.

=>Hhese are a lot less frequent. They're mostly used for end-user virtualization.

You might see some in the market that are called: Oracle, VirtualBox,
or VMware Workstation. They have a higher latency than a Type 1 hypervisor.

once you have your

hypervisor installed, you can build virtual environments, or virtual machines,

or simply put, VMs.

A VM is simply a software based computer. They're run like

a physical computer. They have an operating system and applications, and

they're completely independent of one another, but you can run multiple of them

on a hypervisor. And the hypervisor manages the resources that are allocated

to these virtual environments from the physical server.

Because they're

independent you can run different operating systems on different virtual

machines. You could run Windows here, or Linux here, or UNIX here for example.

Because they're independent they're also extremely portable. You can move a

virtual machine from one hypervisor to another hypervisor on a completely

different machine almost instantaneously, which gives you a lot of

flexibility and a lot of portability within your environment. So looking at

all of this - this is the core virtualization as a process.

Benefits:

1) Cost savings.

When you think about this and the fact that you can run multiple virtual

environments from one piece of infrastructure, means that you can

drastically reduce your physical infrastructure footprint. This is

consolidation at its core. And the fact that you don't have to maintain nearly

as many servers, run as much electricity, save on maintenance costs, means that you

save on your bottom line at the end of the day.

2) Would

be agility and speed. Like I said, spinning up a virtual machine is

relatively easy and quick - a lot more simple than provisioning an entire new

environment for your developers if they say they want to spin up a new

environment so that they can run a test scenario. Whatever it might be,

virtualization makes that process a lot simpler and quicker. And

3) lowers your downtime.

Let's say that this host goes out unexpectedly. The fact that you can move

virtual machines from one hypervisor to another, on a different physical server,

means that you have a great backup plan in place. Right? So, if this host goes down

you can simply move your VMs very quickly to another hypervisor on a

machine that is working. Virtualization and VMs are at the center of cloud

computing and provide many benefits.

Types Of Virtual Machines

also known as virtual servers orvirtual instances or instances depending on cloud provider.

The various cloud providers make VMs available in a variety of configurations and deployment

options to serve different use cases.

When you create a virtual server in the cloud, you specify the Region and Zone or Data Center

you want the server to be provisioned in and the Operating System you want on it.

 You can choose between shared (that is, a multi-tenant) VMs or dedicated (that is,

a single-tenant) VMs.

You can also choose between hourly or monthly billing, and select storage and networking

options for the virtual server.

Shared or Public Cloud VMs

Shared or Public Cloud VMs are provider-managed, multi-tenant deployments that can be
provisioned on-demand with predefined sizes.

Being multi-tenant means that the underlying physical server is virtualized and is shared

across other tenants or users.

To satisfy different workloads, cloud providers offer predefined sizes and configurations

ranging from a single virtual core and a small amount of RAM to multiple virtual cores and

much larger amounts of RAM s.

For example there can be configurations for Compute Intensive workloads, Memory intensive

workloads, or High Performance I/O.

Rather than pick from only pre-defined sizes, some

providers also offer custom configurations that allow users to define the number of cores

and RAM and local storage characteristics.

Public VMs are usually priced by the hour (or in some cases even seconds) and configurations
start as low as pennies per hour.

Some providers also let you get monthly VMs, which can result in some cost savings if you

know you will run the VM for at least a month, but if you decide to de-commision the VM in

the middle of the month, you will still be charged for the full month.

Transeint or Spot VMs

Transient or Spot VMs take advantage of unused capacity in a cloud data center.

Cloud providers make this unused capacity available to users at a much lower cost than

regular VMs of similar sizes.

Although the Transient VMs are available at a huge discount, the Cloud provider can choose

to de-provision them at any time and reclaim the resources for provisioning regular, higher-priced,

VMs.

Because you run the risk of losing these VMs when capacity in the data center decreases,

these VMs are great for non-production workloads such as testing and developing applications.

They are also useful for running stateless workloads, testing scalability, or running

big data and high performance computing (HPC) workloads at a low cost.

Reserved Virtual server Instances

Reserved virtual server instances allow you to reserve capacity and guarantee resources

for future deployments.

You reserve desired amount of virtual server capacity, provision instances from that capacity

when you need them, and choose a term, such as 1 year or 3 years, for your reserved capacity.

You're guaranteed this capacity within the data center of your choice for the life of

the contract term.

By committing to a longer term, you can also lower your costs compared to hourly or monthly

instances.

This can be useful when you know you require at least a certain level of cloud capacity

for a specific duration.

And if you exceed your reserved capacity, you can always choose to supplement your unplanned

usage and capacity requirements with hourly or monthly VMs.

Note however that not all predefined VMs families or configurations may be available as reserved.

Dedicted Hosts

Dedicated hosts offer single-tenant isolation.

This means that only your VMs run on a given host so they can make exclusive use of full

capacity and resources of the underlying hardware.

When provisioning a dedicated host you to specify the data center and POD in which you

want your host placed.

You then assign instances, or virtual machines, to a specific host.

This allows for maximum control over workload placement.

Bare Metal Servers

A bare metal server is a single-tenant, dedicated physical server. In other words, it's dedicated

to a single customer.

The cloud provider actually takes the physical server and plugs it into a rack in a data

center for customers. The cloud provider manages the server up to the operating system (OS),

which means if anything goes wrong with the hardware or rack connection, they will fix

or replace it and then reboot the server. The customer is responsible for administering

and managing everything else on the server.

Bare metal servers are either preconfigured by the cloud provider to meet workload packages

or they can be custom-configured as per customer specifications. This includes the processors,

RAM, hard drives, specialized components, and the OS.

Customers can also install their

own OS and can install certain hypervisors that aren't available from the cloud provider,

and thus create their own virtual machines and farms. With bare metal servers you can

also add GPUs, which are designed for accelerating scientific computation, data analytics, and

rendering professional grade virtualized graphics.

Because bare metal servers are physical machines, they take longer to provision than virtual

servers. Pre-configured builds of bare metal can take 20 to 40 minutes to provision and

custom-builds can take around three or four hours, but these provisioning times can vary

by Cloud provider.

As Bare Metal servers are dedicated for use by a single client at any

given time, they tend to be more expensive than similarly sized Virtual Machines.

 Also

note that unlike virtual servers, not all cloud providers provide Bare Metal servers."
Since bare metal servers are fully customizable, they can do what a customer wants in the most

demanding environments.

 Bare metal servers are dedicated and intended for long term,

high performance use in highly secure and isolated environments.

Clients have full access

and control of bare metal servers because there’s no hypervisor required. This means

that they can be scaled up and optimized for high availability as needed.

As there is no sharing underlying server hardware with other customers, Bare metal servers fulfil

the demanding needs of high-performance computing (HPC) and data intense applications that
require

“minimal latency-related delays”. These servers also excel in big data analytics applications

and GPU-intensive solutions.

Some workload examples that bare metal servers satisfy are ERP, CRM, AI, Deep Learning, and

virtualization.

If you use any applications that require high degrees of security control or apps that you’ve

typically run in an on-premises environment, then a bare metal server is a good alternative

in the cloud.

When comparing bare metal servers to virtual servers, some of the most important considerations

are found in customer need. Bare metal servers work best for: CPU and I/O intensive workloads,

excel with highest performance and security, satisfy strict compliance requirements, and

offer complete flexibility, control and transparency but come with added management and
operational

overhead. Whereas, virtual servers are rapidly provisioned, provide an elastic & scalable

environment, and are low cost to use, however since they share underlying hardware with

other virtual servers, they can be limited in throughput and performance.

Secure Networking in Cloud

As cloud environments gain greater adoption, and digital data invites rapidly increasing

cybersecurity threats, building secure networks on the cloud is crucial.

Let’s look at how we can build a secure cloud networking presence.

As one might expect, the notion of building a cloud network is not much different from

deploying a network in an on-premises data center.

The main difference stems from the fact, that in the cloud, we use logical instances of
networking elements as opposed to physical devices.

For example, Network Interface Controllers (NICs) would be represented by vNICs in cloud

environments.

In the cloud, networking functions are delivered as a service rather than in the form of rack-
mounted devices.

To create a network in the cloud, one starts by defining the size of the network, or the

IP address range that establishes the boundaries or the cloud network.

Cloud networks are deployed in networking spaces that are logically separated segments

of the networks using options, including Virtual private Cloud (VPC) that in turn can be divided

into smaller segments called subnets.

Logically segmented cloud networks are private carveout of the cloud that offer customers

the security of private clouds and the scalability of public clouds.

Cloud resources, such as VMs or Virtual Server Instances (VSIs), Storage, network connectivity

and load balancers are deployed into subnets.

Using subnets allows users to deploy enterprise applications using the same multi-tier concepts

used in on-premises environments.

Subnets are also the main area where security is implemented in the cloud.

Every subnet is protected by Access Control Lists (ACLS) that serve as a subnet-level

fire wall.

Within the subnet, one could create Security Groups that provide security at the instance

level such as VSIs.

Once you build a subnet, then it is time to add some VSIs and storage to it so that you

could run your applications.

Let’s say you have a 3-tier application that require web access VSIs, applications

tier VSIs and backend database VSIs.

In this case, we would place the web facing VSIs into one Security Group, the Application

VSIs in a second Security Group, while the database VSIs in a third SG.

It goes without saying that the web-facing VISs need Internet access.

A public Gateway instance is added to the network to enable users’ access to the application

in the internet tier.

While public gateways are great for Internet access to the cloud, enterprises are interested
in extending their on-premises resources to the cloud by securely connecting them using

Virtual Private Networks, or VPNs.

When building many subnets and deploying several workloads, it becomes necessary to ensure

that applications continue to be responsive.

That is achieved with Load Balancers that ensure availability of bandwidth for the different

applications.

Enterprises with hybrid cloud environment find using dedicated high-speed connections

between clouds and on-premises resources is a more secured and more efficient way than

public connectivity solutions.

Some cloud service providers offer such connectivity, such as IBM Cloud and its Direct Link
solution

that enables extending on-premises resources to the cloud as needed.

 a cloud network entails creating a set of logical constructs that deliver networking

functionality that is akin to the data center networks that all IT professionals have come

to rely on for securing their environments and ensuring high performing business applications.

CONTAINERS

-->Containers are an executable unit of software in which application code is packaged, along with
its libraries and dependencies, in common ways so that it can be run anywhere, whether it be on

desktop, traditional IT, or the cloud.

Containers are small, fast, and portable, and unlike virtual machines, they do not

need to include a guest OS in every instance and can, instead, simply leverage

the features and resources of the host OS.

 container technology has actually been around for

quite some time. It's actually back in 2008 that the Linux kernel introduced C groups, and control
groups, that basically paved the way for all the different container technologies we see today.

So that includes Docker, but also things like Cloud Foundry, as well as Rocket and

other container runtimes out there.

Let's

get started with an example, and we'll

say that I was a developer. I've

created a node.js application and I want

to push it into production.

We'll take two different form factors to

kind of explain the advantages of

containerization. Let's say that first

we'll talk about VMs, and then we'll talk

about containers.

First things first, let's introduce

some of the things that we've got here.

We've got the hardware itself, just a

big box. We've got the guest, or rather,

the host, operating system, as well as a

hypervisor. Hypervisor is actually what

allows us to spin up VMs.

Let's take a look at this shared pool of

resources with the host OS and

hypervisor. We can assume that some of

these resources have already been

consumed. Next, let's go ahead and take

this .js application and push it in. And

to do that, I need a Linux VM, so let's go

ahead and sketch out that Linux VM.

In this VM there's a few things to note

here. We've got another operating

system, in addition to the host OS, it's

gonna be the guest OS, as well as some

binaries and libraries. That's one of

the things about Linux VMs, that even

though we're working with a really

lightweight application, to create that

Linux VM, we have to put that guest OS in

there, in a set of binaries and libraries.

That really bloats it out. In fact,

I think the smallest node .js VM

that I've seen out there is 400 plus

mega bytes, whereas the node.js

runtime and app itself would be

under 15. So we've got that and

we'll go ahead and let's push that .js

application into it. Just by doing that alone,

we're gonna consume a set of resources.

Next, let's think about scaling this out.

So we'll create two additional

copies of it, and you'll notice that even

though it's the exact same application,

we have to use and deploy that

separate guest OS and libraries every

time. And so we'll do that three times.

And by doing that, essentially, we can

assume that for this particular hardware

we've consumed all of the all of the

resources. There's another thing that

I haven't mentioned here, but this

.js application, I developed it on my

macbook. So when I pushed it into

production to get it going on the VM, and

notice that there were some issues and

incompatibilities. This is the kind

of foundations is big, he

said, she said issue. Where things might

be working on your local machine, and

work great, but when you try to push it

into production, things start to break.

And this really gets in the way of doing

agile DevOps, and continuous integration

and delivery. That's solved when you use

something like containers. There's a

three-step process when kind of doing

anything container related, and then

pushing, or creating, containers. And it

almost always starts with first, some

sort of a manifest. So something that

describes the container itself. In the

Docker world, this would be something

like a Docker file. And in Cloud Foundry,

this would be a manifest Channel. Next,

what you'll do is create the actual

image itself. For the image,

again, if you're working with

something like Docker, that could be

something like a Docker image. If you're

working with Rocket it would be an ACI

or application container image. So

regardless of the different

containerization technologies, this

process stays the same. The last thing

you end up with is an actual container

itself. You know, that contains all of the

runtimes, and libraries, and binaries

needed to run an application. That

application runs on a very similar set

up to the VMS, but what we've got on this

side is, again, a host operating

system. The difference here, instead of a

hypervisor, we're gonna have something

like a runtime engine. So if you're using

Docker this would be the Docker engine

and, you know, different

containerization technologies would have

a different engine.

Regardless, it's something that runs

those containers. Again, we've got this

shared pool of resources, so we can

assume that that alone consumes some set

of resources. Next, let's think about

actually containerizing this technology.

We talked about the three-step

process. We create a docker

file. We build out the image. We push it

to a registry, and we have our container

and we can start pushing this out as

containers. The great thing is, these are

going to be much more lightweight. So

deploying out multiple containers, since

you don't have to worry about a guest OS

this time, you really just have the

libraries, as well as the

the application itself. We've scaled

that out three times, and because we

don't have to duplicate all of those

operating system dependencies and create

bloated VMs, we actually will use less

resources. So use a different color

here... and scaling that out three times, we

still have a good amount of resources

left.
Next, let's say that my coworker decides,

hey, for this .js application, let's take

advantage of a third party -

let's say a cognitive API - to do

something like image recognition.

Let's say that we've got our third

party service, and we want to access that

using maybe a Python application. So he's

created that service that acts as that

third party APIs. And with our node.js

application, we want to access that

Python app, to then access that

service. If we wanted to do this in VMs,

I'm really tempted to basically create a

VM out of both the .js application and the

Python application. Because essentially

that would allow me to continue to use

the VMs that I have. But that's not truly

cloud native, right? Because if I wanted

to scale out the .js, but not the Python

app, I wouldn't be able to if they were

running in the same VM. So to do it in a

truly cloud native way, essentially I

would have to free up some of these

resources. Basically get rid of one of

these VMs, and then deploy the Python

application in it instead. And you know,

that's not ideal. But with the container

based approach what we can do is simply

say, since we're modular, we can say, okay,

just deploy one copy of the Python

application. So we'll go ahead and do

that. There's a different color here. And

that consumes a little bit more

resources. Then with those

those remaining resources, the great

thing about container technology, that

actually becomes shared between all the

processes running. In fact, another

advantage if some of these

container processes aren't actually

utilizing the CPU or memory, all of those

shared resources become accessible for

the other

containers running within

that hardware.

So with container-based technology, we

can truly take advantage of cloud native

based architectures. We talked about

things like portability of the

containers. We talked about how it's

easier to scale them out. And then

overall, with this kind of three-step

process and the way we push containers,

allows for more agile devops and

continuous integration and delivery.

Containers streamline development and

deployment of Cloud Native applications.

In the next lesson, we will cover cloud

storage.

BASICS OF CLOUD STORAGE

Cloud storage is where you save data and files in the cloud.

Certain storage must be attached to a compute node before the storage can be accessed, whereas

other storage types can be directly accessed either through the public Internet or a dedicated

private network connection.

Cloud providers host, secure, manage, and maintain the cloud storage and associated

infrastructure to ensure you have access to your data when you need it.

Cloud storage services allow you to scale your capacity as you need so you only pay

for what you provision, usually on a ‘per gigabyte’ basis.

The cost of storage will vary by type but in general, the faster the read / write speed

of the storage, the higher the per gigabyte cost.

Cloud storage is available in four main types – Direct Attached, File Storage, Block Storage

and Object Storage.

Direct Attached storage

– sometimes referred to as ‘Local Storage’ - is storage which

is presented directly to a cloud-based server and is effectively either within the host

server chassis or within the same rack.

-This storage is fast and normally only used to store a server’s operating system, although

it can have other use cases.The main two reasons why direct attached storage is not so great

for other uses besides to store the operating system is that it’s typically ‘Ephemeral’

– meaning that it only lasts as long at the compute resource it’s attached to – it

cannot be shared with other nodes and while you can use RAID techniques, it’s not as

resilient to failure as other types of storage.

File storage

- is typically presented to compute nodes as ‘NFS Storage’.

-NFS stands for Network File System and means that the storage is connected to compute nodes

over a standard ethernet network.

-NFS-mounted storage is common-place but it tends to be slower than either direct-attached

storage or block storage because the data travels over an ethernet network.

It also tends to be lower cost than either direct attached or block storage.

One advantage of File Storage is that it can be mounted or used on multiple servers at

once.
File-based storage is a simple, straightforward approach to data storage and works well for

organizing data in a hierarchical folder structure, that desktop users are familiar with.

Block storage

- is presented to compute nodes using high-speed fibre connections, which

means that read and write speeds are typically much faster and reliable than with file storage,

making block storage suitable for use with databases and other applications where disk

speed is important.

You typically provision block storage in ‘volumes’, which can then be mounted onto a compute node,

which it then effectively sees as another hard drive.

Volumes can normally only be mounted onto one compute node at a time.

With both File and Block storage, you may also hear the term ‘IOPS’.

IOPS stands for ‘Input/Output Operations Per Second’ and relates to the speed of

the storage or to put it another way, how quickly data can be read from or written to

the storage.

Persistence is a term that is used when provisioning File or Block storage and relates to what

happens to the storage once the compute node it is attached to is terminated.

If the storage is set to ‘persist’ then it will not be deleted along with the compute

node, meaning that it and its data are preserved and available to mount onto another compute

node, though you will continue to pay for the storage.

You can also, in some cases, set the storage so that it is automatically deleted with the

compute node that it is mounted onto – in this case, as we know, it becomes Ephemeral

Storage.

Here, you will also stop paying for the storage but you will lose any data unless it is backed

up somewhere.

There are several ways to backup data in the cloud but one way to back up both File and

Block storage is to take a Snapshot.

As the term implies, this is a point in time image of the storage.

Snapshots are usually fast to create (they don’t actually write any data, or rather

they create metadata), don’t require downtime and subsequent snapshots record only changes

to the data.

They are great for returning storage to the way it was at a particular snapshot, though
note, they cannot be used to recover individual files.

The fourth kind of storage is Object storage.

This is a different type of storage in so much as it’s not attached to a compute node,

rather it is accessed via an API.

Of all the storage types, Object Storage is by far the cheapest and also the slowest in

terms of read and write speeds, but it is infinite in size to the end user.

Unlike File and Block storage where you provision a certain storage capacity and it fills up

over time, with Object Storage you can keep adding files to it and it never fills up,

you just pay for what you use.

This makes Object Storage a fantastic repository for all sorts of unstructured data types,

large and small, including documents, video, logs, backups, data from IoT, application

binaries and virtual machine images.

FILE STORAGE

Like direct attached storage, file storage must be attached to a compute node before

it can be accessed and have data stored on it.

However, File Storage can be less expensive, more resilient to failure, and involve lesser

disk management and maintenance for you as the user to do , as compared to direct attached

storage.

You can also provision much larger amounts of File Storage and present it as a disk to

a server.

File storage is mounted from remote storage appliances.

That is, the physical disks are contained in a separate, specialised piece of hardware

and they are then connected to the compute node via the underlying infrastructure in

the datacentre.

These storage appliances are not only extremely resilient to failure, the data is also far

more secure in them as these storage appliances offer services such as encryption in transit

and encryption at rest.

These appliances are all managed by the service provider.

File Storage is mounted to compute nodes via an ethernet network – the same kind of network

that you might receive email or browse the internet over, although this ethernet network
is normally dedicated to the task.

This means it can sometimes be referred to as ‘Network Attached Storage’, ‘Network

File Storage’ or simply ‘NFS.

One of the issues with ethernet networks is that their speed can vary – the more loaded

an ethernet network is, the more likely it becomes that it’s speed or bandwidth will

be affected.

Of course, Cloud Providers build their storage networks to handle very high volumes of traffic

but even so, consistent speed cannot be guaranteed.

Therefore, File storage tends to be used for workloads where consistently high network

speeds are not a requirement.

In terms of workloads, File Storage can typically be mounted onto more than one compute node

at a time, where the mounted disk or volume looks just like another drive on the compute

node.

The ability for File Storage to be mounted to multiple compute nodes at a time make it

an ideal solution where some sort of common storage is required – for example, a departmental

file share, a ‘landing zone’ for incoming files that need to be processed by an application,

or a repository of files that a web service might access.

In these applications, the potential variance in the speed of the connecting network is

not really an issue.

Of course, where cost is an issue, you can use file storage for other applications such

as databases, but the trade-off is speed.

When you provision file storage, one consideration you need to take into account is the IOPS

capacity of the storage.

IOPS stands for Input/Output Operations Per Second and refers to the speed at which the

disks can write and read data (note this is not the speed of the network between the storage

and the compute node).

The higher the IOPS value, the faster the speed of the underlying disk.

A higher IOPS will also normally cost more.

Understanding IOPS is important because if the IOPS value is too low for your application,

the storage can become a bottleneck and cause your application to run slowly.

Alternatively, if the IOPS is too high, you will probably be paying more that you need
to for your storage.

For example, a file share may be mounted on 30 different compute nodes and an application

writes and requests data to and from that share 60 times per minute.

You can average that out to 1 operation per second.

With this simple example, you can see that each application has different IOPS requirements.

BLOCK STORAGE

Block storage breaks files into chunks (or blocks) of data and Stores each block separately

under a unique address.

Like direct attached storage and file storage, block storage also must be attached to a compute

node before it can be utilized for your workloads.

Block storage, like file storage, can be mounted from remote storage appliances, making it

extremely resilient to failure, and keeping data far more secure in them, on account of

encryption in transit, and encryption at rest services - available on these appliances.

Block storage is mounted as a volume to compute nodes using a dedicated network of fibres,

through which signals move at the speed of light.

These fibre optic networks are more expensive to build than the ethernet ones which deliver

File Storage, which is one reason why Block Storage tends to have a higher price-point.

However, since the traffic is moving faster and with speed consistency, they are perfect

for workloads that need low-latency storage to work effectively.

In terms of workloads, it is important to note that unlike File Storage, which can be

mounted onto 80 computer nodes or more, Block storage is normally mounted onto only one

compute node at a time.

Since these disks run at a consistent high speed, they are perfect for workloads that

need consistently fast storage, such as databases and mail servers.

Block storage is not suitable for workloads where there needs to be some level of disk

sharing between compute nodes.

For block storage, as it is for file storage, you need to take the IOPS capacity of the

storage into account.

Most cloud providers will allow you to specify IOPS characteristics when you provision storage

and, in some cases, adjust the IOPS of your storage as you need, so if the requirements

or usage behaviour of an application changes, you can adjust accordingly.

So, to summarise the commonalities and differences between these two storage types:

Block and File Storage is taken from appliances which are maintained by the service provider.

Both are normally highly available and resilient and will often include data encryption at

rest and in transit.

File storage is attached to compute nodes using an ethernet network, so it is sometimes

called Network attached or NFS Storage.

File storage is very reliable, but the speed of the connecting network can vary, based

on load.

Block storage is attached via a high-speed fibre network, which is very reliable and

consistent.

File storage can be attached to multiple compute nodes at once.

Block storage can only be attached to one node at a time.

File storage is a good choice where file shares are required, where workloads do not require

lightning fast connectivity to storage, or where cost is a factor.

Block storage is a good choice when supporting an application that needs consistent fast

access to disk, such as databases.

Remember to consider the IOPS requirements of the application when provisioning either

file or block storage.

OBJECT STORAGE-OVERVIEW

In this video, we’re going to start to understand what Object Storage is, how data is stored

in Object Storage, and how it differs from the more traditional storage types such as

File and Block Storage.

The first thing to note about Object Storage is that you do not connect it to a particular

compute node in order to use it.

Instead, you provision an Object Storage service instance and use an API (or Application Program

Interface) to upload, download, and manage your data.

This means you can directly use Object Storage with anything that can call an API and you

don’t need an underlying compute node.

The second thing to note about Object Storage is that it’s less expensive that other cloud

storage options.
It’s per gigabyte cost is typically a couple of US cents per month and in some cases, even

less, depending on the storage tier used.

More on storage tiers later.

The third and possibly most important thing to note about Object Storage is that it’s

effectively infinite.

With file and block storage, you specify the size of the storage you want in gigabytes

or terabytes and then pay a fee based on the size you provisioned.

With Object Storage, you just consume the storage you need and pay per gigabyte cost

for what you use.

You can keep uploading files and the storage will never run out.

So, when would you use Object Storage?

Well, Object Storage is great for storing large amounts of unstructured data.

By unstructured this means that the data is not stored in any kind of hierarchical folder

or directory structure – Object Storage uses ‘buckets’, and objects are stored

within these buckets in a structurally flat way.

A bucket is a bit like a folder, in the sense that you can give them meaningful names, and

of course have different buckets for different object-types but you cannot place a bucket

within a bucket.

When an object is placed in a bucket, it also has some metadata (data about the data) added

to it, such as an object ID.

This metadata helps applications to both locate and access the object, as well as provide

information on the time that the data was stored or last accessed.

When you create a bucket, you don’t need to provide or define any sizing information—the

bucket will just hold the data that you place inside it and the service provider ensures

that there is sufficient storage capacity available.

Buckets can hold as little as a few bytes of data, right up to multiple petabytes and

you can build up the amount of data stored as slowly or quickly as you like—as well

as shrink it back down again.

The service provider also takes care of resilience and making sure that the Object Storage solution

is highly available.

Some cloud providers offer different types of buckets with different levels of resilience.
For example, they offer buckets which are resilient, but the data is only stored in

one data centre.

This is a good option where data needs to reside in a particular geographical location

or in situations where high availability is less of an issue.

They will then offer buckets which are highly available across regions, where the data is

stored multiple times in different datacentres (or zones) in the same region or even in multiple

regions.

These options usually cost more but they provide both the highest level of resilience as well

as availability for your data.

Object Storage has a very ‘flat’ storage structure, which we’ll explain in the next

lesson.

This data can be anything from text files to audio and video files, from IOT data to

virtual machine images, from backup files to data archives.

Pretty much any data which is static and where fast read and write speeds are not necessary

would make a good fit for object storage.

Object Storage would, however, not be suitable for running operating systems, nor applications

such as databases or anything else where the contents of the files changes.

So, to summarize what we have learned in this lesson:

Object Storage is used to store files—or Objects—which are static.

The data that you can store using Object Storage can be anything from text files to audio and

video files, from IOT data to virtual machine images, from backup files to data archives.

You cannot run operating systems or other applications such as databases using Object

Storage.

Objects are stored in Buckets.

You can have multiple buckets, but you cannot place buckets within buckets.

You do not need to specify a size for a bucket, you can just use as little or as much space

as you need.

Many providers offer different types of buckets with different charges for each.

Some are based on resilience and availability, while others are based on the frequency at

which the objects inside are accessed.

OBJECT STORAGE-TIERS AND APIS

In this video, we’re going to look more closely at Object Storage data tiers and Object

Storage APIs.

Object Storage buckets also have storage ‘tiers’ or ‘classes’ associated with them and

these tiers are based on how frequently the data is accessed.

A standard tier bucket is where you would store objects that are frequently accessed.

This tier tends to have the highest per gigabyte cost associated with it.

A ‘vault’ or ‘archive’ tier is where you might store documents that are only accessed

perhaps only once or twice a month or less, and this will be offered at a lower storage

cost, whereas there may also be ‘cold vault’ tier, where you would store data that is typically

accessed only once or twice a year.

This storage often costs just a fraction of a US cent per gigabyte per month.

Often, you can also set up automatic archiving rules for your data, meaning that if an object

isn’t accessed for a period of time, it will automatically be moved to a cheaper storage

tier.

The rule uses some of the object’s metadata to determine when it should be archived.

Note that Object Storage does not come with IOPS options.

Object Storage tends to be very slow in comparison with file or block storage, where downloads

typically take seconds, if not longer, to complete.

Where providers offer ‘cold vault’ buckets, data retrieval from these tiers can sometimes

even take hours because the storage is kept off-line.

If your application needs fast access to files, then Object Storage may not be a good option.

We’ve mentioned that Object Storage is priced per gigabyte used but there can also be other

costs related to retrieval of the data.

These costs are similarly low but access charges can be higher for data that is in vault or

cold vault tiers, so it is important to ensure that the data is in the correct tier, based

on its frequency of access.

Object Storage does not need to be attached to a compute node for you to access it, rather

you access Object Storage through an Application Program Interface, or API.

The most common API for object storage is called the ‘S3’ API, which is a standard

based on the S3 Object Storage offered by AWS.

Many providers offer APIs to their Object Storage which is S3 compatible, which is useful

because it means developers can write code which is able to access multiple vendor’s

Object Storage.

The API itself is an HTTP-based RESTful API or RESTful Web service.

The API call allows applications to manage object storage and buckets as well as PUT

(upload) or GET (download) objects to and from them,

Object storage is not just for new applications but can be used to meet requirements for existing

ones.

It can also be used as an effective solution for backup and disaster recovery as a replacement

for offsite, tape-based solutions, reducing the time to restore data.

Many backup packages now include the ability to back data up into the cloud, using Object

Storage.

Object storage is more efficient than tape backup solutions, which require tapes that

need to be physically loaded into, and removed from, tape drives, and moved off-site for

geographic redundancy.

So, to summarize what we have learned in this lesson:

Object Storage has different tiers, with different charges for each.

Some are based on the frequency at which the objects inside are accessed.

Object Storage is priced per gigabyte of storage used per month, plus some charges for data

retrieval.

Object Storage is much cheaper than file or block storage.

Object Storage is very slow in comparison with File and Block Storage.

You can often create rules which allow the automatic ‘archiving’ of objects to cheaper

tiers when they are infrequently accessed.

Object Storage is accessed using an API.

Many Object Storage providers have an ‘S3 Compatible’ API, which means developers

can create code that will work against multiple-vendors Object Storage solutions

Object storage in the Cloud offeres an effective Backup and Disaster Recovery solution.

CDN

[Music]
A content delivery network, or CDN, is a

distributed server network that delivers

temporarily stored, or cached, copies of

website content to users, based on the

user's geographic location. A CDN stores

this content in distributed locations

and reduces the distance between your

website visitors, and your website server.

In the rest of the video, we'll learn

more about Content Delivery Networks.

Hi. I'm Ryan Sumner, I'm a Chief Network

Architect with IBM cloud, and today I'm

going to help you answer: what is a

content delivery network? So, in short, a

content delivery network, or CDN, is a

service that accelerates Internet

content delivery. In other words, the

main benefit of a CDN is that it makes

your website faster. Before I get into

describing to you how it accomplishes

that, and some of the other benefits,

first I want to talk to you about some

of the challenges that we have where we

have users all around the world, but we

don't have servers all around the world,

and the experience that those users have

due to that dynamic. I've got a simple

diagram here showing a server hosted

down in Dallas. This is my website. And

then I have users all around the world.

So, in Sidney I might have five.In London

I've got five. New York I might have ten.

LA I might have ten. I've got 30 users

around the world that are accessing my

server and my website down in Dallas.

Let's kind of follow a set of these

users in their journey. Let's look at

their users down in Sydney. They make a

request to the website. They've got an 8,600

mile hike to Dallas, and then an 8,600

mile hike back. The amount of time

that that takes is usually measured and

measured in milliseconds, and just that

round-trip might be about 170

milliseconds. For our users up in London,

that might be about 100

seconds. Our users in New York City

can probably experience about a 40

millisecond round-trip time. And over in

LA, about 30. So as you can see, the

further you're away,

the longer it takes ultimately, the

slower the website will be for you. So

this is where the the CDN comes into

play, and this is how it actually

accomplishes the increase in speed,

which is by reducing the amount of

distance between the user and the

content, or the server providing the

content. What it does by doing that is,

it places these content delivery

network endpoints in as many locations

around the world as possible. And in our

case, we're going to assume we've got one

in just about every location where our

users exist. Now when the user in

Sydney, or London, or New York City, or LA

tries to access some content, it's first

retrieved by the content delivery

network service and then distributed

around the world. So we have a single

request down to the Dallas server. It's

now then distributed all around the

world, and our users in London now

instead of going all the way to Dallas,

they're able to retrieve that content

directly from their closest geographical

location, drastically reducing the amount

of time that it takes to retrieve that

content. As you can see here, it's very

basic how a CDN is able to provide the

benefits to the end-user by reducing

the amount of time that it takes to

deliver the service. But what you're not

seeing here, is an indirect benefit, is

the reduction in the amount of traffic

that actually hits the Dallas server. So

the indirect benefit is that you

actually see a reduction in the load,

or a reduction in the amount of capacity

that you need in Dallas, to serve all

these users. Another indirect benefit

because of there's this much less

validity, and so much less stuff

happening in Dallas, because all these

users are

having to make these trips. And

I'm also not having to communicate with

with users so far away. The Dallas

environment may also see an increase in

uptime. And then lastly, because the users

are not really directly communicating

with the servers down in Dallas,

you have the indirect benefit of an

increase in security through obscurity.

It's pretty basic to understand how a

CDN works in the end to provide a better

benefit to the end user.

HYBRID MULTICLOUD

Hybrid Cloud, as we covered in the

previous lesson, is a computing

environment that connects and

organizations on-premise private cloud

and third-party public cloud into a

single infrastructure for running the

organization's applications. Multicloud

is a cloud adoption strategy that

embraces a mix of cloud models from

different service providers -

public, private, and managed - across

infrastructure, platform, or software

services. For example, a business may

consume email as a service from one

provider, a CRM application from another,

and infrastructure from yet another

provider. So, essentially, a Hybrid

Multi-cloud implies you're able to

leverage the best of cloud models and

services across different service

providers, and have your applications and

workloads working seamlessly across

multiple different clouds. In this video

we will look at some use cases for why a

business may want to use a hybrid multi-

cloud approach. In this video I want to

touch on a few of those use cases for

why a business may want to use hybrid or

multicloud. Let's start with the basic

one: cloud scaling. Now most of us are

probably familiar with this, it's one of

the main reasons for adopting the cloud.

Now let's say we have a flower delivery

service that is able to hit a certain

bottom line of users to have on-premise

infrastructure, and it can hit a certain

amount of user load. So, visualizing this

here throughout a calendar year, you can

imagine that their load maybe goes up

and down, and responds to specific

holidays. Now to hit those peaks, they

could scale up their on-premise

architecture, but that's met with upfront

costs and cost of upkeep. Now instead

what they'll do, is take advantage of

cloud that allows them to scale up in

response to that load, and then

automatically deprovision resources when

they no longer need them. This

concept is kind of general to cloud

computing, not just hybrid or multicloud.

That brings me to my next topic. Here

we're gonna be talking about how it can

be used to build a composite cloud.

Essentially this is going to be

applications that are spread across

multiple cloud environments. Back to

the flower delivery service. Let's say

they have on-premise architecture that

allows them to run three major

components of their app. So, let's say

they have the web UI. They have some

billing API's, as well as a rewards

framework. Now let's say that this

service is actually based in EU, and

their European customers are happy. But

for their North American or American

customers, it's best specifically around,

you know, Veterans Day or Thanksgiving,

they're noticing that the system is

bogging down. So they decide to take

advantage of a hybrid cloud or multi-

cloud architecture by composing their

application across multiple cloud

environments. So, they'll take advantage

of data centers in America, and

essentially, they've identified that

although the rewards framework can stay

on Prem in their European side, they want

to move the billing and the UI

capabilities over. They'll move just

those two to a cloud platform of their

choice in a North American or American

datacenter. This allows them to

scale up portions in response to

American holidays, while keeping their EU

portions individually scaled. In this

example the flower delivery service is

able to take advantage of scaling at a

global level by using the hybrid or

multicloud architecture. Next let's talk

about the airline or travel industry.

We can first start with an example of

modernization.

In the past we've seen that

reservation systems may have been

difficult to work with, or you might have

had to call in. But almost all the

airline companies now have a mobile

application. So most of the time, and

we've actually found that, it's about - in

general - not just in the travel industry,

but 80% of all enterprise applications

are actually still on Prem. And that's

likely the case in this industry as well.

So, in this specific example, let's say

they have a reservation system that's

running on prem. But to create new

experiences for their end-users, let's

say they've created a mobile application.

That mobile app, of course, has a mobile

backend that's maybe running in a public

cloud. That in turn works with the

reservation service. So again, the mobile

app can hit the mobile backend, that in

turn works with the reservation

capabilities.

In this case, they've modernized and

new user experiences are possible. But

let's take that a step further. A

source for a lot of dissatisfaction for

users, is whenever their flights are

delayed - so when a flight is delayed, they

may have to rebook new flights. The

solution is almost always the same. The

traveler wants to get to his destination

in the easiest way possible. What

airline industries have been doing is

taking advantage of the cloud to create

maybe a recommendation feature. It

allows them to book new flights as soon

as the delay is recommended, or as soon

as the delay is incurred. That's

going to connect up to that mobile

backend service, allowing users to be

able to book flights through their phone

the second of flight is delayed. This not

only improves the bottom line for the

airline industry, it leads to happier users.

That's one way the modernization has

been done. Next, let's take it even a step

further and talk about data and AI.

For data and AI, the airline industry has

been taking advantage of lots of

historical data. Over the decades that

a company has been around, let's say they

have historical data of when unplanned

maintenance has happened on their

airline. In fact, 30% of all delay time in

the airline industry is actually

when unplanned maintenance happens. By

taking advantage of, let's say, machine

learning or AI capabilities, they could

hook into all of the legacy data that

they have - large volumes - and connect them

up to machine learning and AI

capabilities. This allows airline

industries to take advantage of

predictive analytics and get insights

before errors, or before the unplanned

maintenance ever occurs. This again

improves their bottom line, leading to

happier users and a more efficient

airline industry. Today we talked

about four major use cases for hybrid

and multicloud platforms: cloud

scaling and composite cloud, in the

flower delivery service, as well as

modernize in data and AI for the

airline industry. Another reason for

adopting hybrid multicloud strategy is

to prevent lock-in to a specific vendor's

cloud platform and having flexibility of

being able to move workloads from one

cloud platform to another as the need

arises. In the next video, we will

understand what a microservices

architecture is, its features, benefits,

and use cases.

MICROSERVICES

micro-services architecture is an

approach in which a single application

is composed of many loosely coupled and

independently deployable smaller

components or services these services

typically have their own stack running

on their own containers they communicate

with one another over a combination of

api's events streaming and message

brokers for a business what this means

is that application components can be

developed and updated more efficiently

by multiple developers working

independently teams can use different

stacks and runtime environments for

different components components facing

too much load can be scaled

independently reducing the waste and

cost associated with having to scale

entire applications in this video we'll

look at how micro services have shaped

application development and also look at

a use case that illustrates micro

services in action the way developers

work to build applications is changing

in the past software was built as large

monolithic applications where a team of

developers would take months to

construct a large application built on a

common code base these developers would

write every part of the application from

start to finish now after decades of

software development there are vast

amounts of code already out there that

developers can use as the base of an

application meaning they no longer have

to create every line of code from

scratch cloud development platforms

provide developers with an ecosystem of

code that can be easily and securely

integrated into applications now instead

of building one huge application on one

team

developers break into small independent

teams where they write smaller amounts

of code called micro services

microservices break down large

applications into their core functions

for example search recommendations

customer ratings or product catalogs

each is developed independently of one

another yet work together on the cloud

development platform to create a

functioning application a container is

the distribution method for each micro

service meaning it delivers the code

where it needs to go

containers are plug-and-play so if one

micro service isn't working for an

application developers can take it out

and put in a different one without

disrupting how the rest of the app

functions check out micro services in

action with Ron Ron is a soccer fan who

uses an online streaming media service

called dream game last night he missed

watching his team play their crucial

semi final match luckily he can watch

the match tonight on dream game when he

logs in he sees the most popular content

among all dream game users after some

searching he finds the match he's

looking for what he would really like is

to find his game with one click

luckily the dream game development team

is using micro services to develop a

better user experience for viewers like

Ron the first micro service is a Content

catalog housing the millions of games

that Dream game offers the small team of

developers organizes each piece of

content with metadata that describes

them this metadata feeds into a second

micro service the search function which

ensures that Ron's search results are

captured and compared to the dream game

catalog the third micro service

recommendations captures data about the

most popular content among all dream

game users this is what generates the

home page that ron saw when he first

logged in these three micro services are

all in their separate containers ready

to join the application but before they

can work together they have to find one

another they do this by using something

called service discovery which creates a

roadmap for these and many other micro

services to communicate when micro

services find each other they

communicate using an application

programming interface or an API so when

Ron searches for his favorite soccer

team the search micro service is

communicating to the content catalog in

an API about what Ron is looking

for now back to the goal at hand to get

Ron to his soccer game with just one

click

the development team working on the

recommendations micro-service is

updating the code adding an analytics

algorithm using analytics the

recommendations micro-service will

compare Ron's viewing history and

preferences to popular content among

other users including soccer fans and

viewers in Ron's geographical region and

demographic since the developers didn't

need to create the code from scratch

they are able to deploy this new

functionality in a matter of days these

updates happen behind the scenes as the

rest of the micro service containers

function normally the next time Ron

checks dream game instead of just seeing

the most popular or newest content he

sees a personalized playlist that will

continue to refine itself as the system

learns more about his viewing habits and

preferences the result Ron finds his

favorite team's latest game right away

the micro service approach lets

developers quickly innovate applications

in parallel and lets users like Ron

focus on the things that really interest

them and when those interests are

changing and growing faster everyday

micro services help businesses keep up

and grow with their customers

[Music]

in the next video we will talk about

serverless computing its features

benefits and some use cases

SERVERLESS COMPUTING SERVICES

Serverless is an approach to computing that offloads responsibility for common infrastructure

management tasks such as scaling, scheduling, patching, and provisioning application stacks

to cloud providers, allowing developers to focus their time and effort on the code and

business logic specific to their applications or process.

Serverless doesn’t mean there are no servers; only that the management of the underlying

physical or virtual servers is removed from their users.

The serverless computing environment allocates resources as needed for the applications.

Let’s look at some key attributes that distinguish serverless computing from other compute models.

The serverless model requires no provisioning of servers, installation of application stacks

and software, or operation of the infrastructure by the developer.

Serverless computing runs code only on-demand on a per-request basis, scaling transparently

with the number of requests being served.

Serverless enables end users to pay only for resources being used, never paying for idle

capacity, which is unlike virtual servers on the cloud—where end users pay for VMs

as long as they are running even if idle.

Effectively, serverless abstracts the infrastructure away from developers.

Code is executed as individual functions where each function runs inside a stateless container.

No prior execution context is required to serve a request; and with each new request,

a new instance of the function is invoked.

Let’s look at a scenario.

You could, for example, have a serverless platform between the front-end of your website

and your storage layer, running individual functions.

The serverless app could be translating text files and storing it in a cloud-based storage

service.

Using the front-end of your website, you send text files to a serverless app; the app creates

translations in different languages, and then stores these translated files in cloud storage,

and sends their links back to you.

Some of the key serverless computing services today include IBM Cloud Functions (which is

based on Apache OpenWhisk), AWS Lamb-da, and Microsoft Azure Functions.

It is important to note that serverless may not be the best fit for all applications or

scenarios.

You need to evaluate application characteristics and ensure that the application is aligned

to serverless architecture patterns.

Applications that qualify for a serverless architecture include some of the following

characteristics: Short-running stateless functions (seconds

or minutes).

Seasonal workloads with varying off-peak and peaks.

Production volumetric data that shows too much idle time.

Event-based processing or asynchronous request processing for implementing use cases.

Microservices that can be built as functions that are stateless.

Serverless architectures are well-suited for use cases around data and event processing,

IoT, microservices, and mobile backends.

Given its inherent and automatic scaling, rapid provisioning, and a pricing model that

does not charge for idle time, supporting microservices architecture has become one

of the most common use cases of serverless computing today.

Serverless is well-suited to working with structured text, audio, image, and video data

around tasks such as data enrichment, transformation, validation and cleansing, PDF processing,

audio normalization, thumbnail generation, and video transcoding.

Parallel tasks such as data search and processing, and genome processing, are also well-suited

to be run on a serverless runtime.

Serverless is also well-suited for working with all sorts of data stream ingestions,

including business data streams, IoT sensor data, log data, and financial market data.

And finally, let’s look at some challenges worth considering about serverless.

Serverless workloads are designed to scale up and down in response to workload, but for

workloads characterized by long-running processes managing a traditional server environment

might be simpler and more cost-effective.

The serverless application architecture can be vendor dependent, and so there is a potential

for vendor lock-in, particularly involving platform capabilities such as authentication,

scaling, monitoring, or configuration management.

Because serverless architectures scale up and down in response to workload, they also
sometimes need to start up from zero to serve a new request.

For certain applications, this delay isn’t much of an impact, but for something like

a low-latency financial application, this delay wouldn’t be acceptable.

CLOUD NATIVE APPLICATIONS

Simply put, a cloud native application is

an application developed from the outset

to work only in the cloud environment, or

an existing app that has been refactored

and reconfigured with cloud native

principles. A cloud native application

consists of microservices working

together as a whole to comprise an

application, yet each can be

independently scaled and iterated

through automation and orchestration

processes. These microservices are often

packaged in containers, which are

executable units of software in which

the application code is packaged along

with its libraries and dependencies so

that it can be run from anywhere. This

independence enables frequent, iterative

improvement of cloud native applications,

without disrupting the experience of

end-users. Cloud native applications are

unlike traditional, or monolithic

applications, that are built out of one

huge piece of software; applications that

tightly couple the user interface,

business-logic layer, and data layer.

Let's take the example of how a cloud

native application might be used on a

travel website. Each topic covered by the

site - flights, hotels, cars, specials - is its

own microservice. Each microservice may

roll out new features independent of the

other microservices. Specials and

discounts can also scale out

independently. While the travel site is

presented to customers as a whole, each

microservice remains independent and

can be scaled or updated as needed

without affecting other services. Whether

creating a new cloud native application

or modernizing an existing application,

developers adhere to a consistent set of

development principles: Follow the

microservices architecture approach by

breaking applications down to single-

function microservices. Rely on

containers for maximum flexibility,

scalability, and portability.

Adopt Agile methods that speed the

creation and improvement process through

quick iterative updates based on user

feedback. In this video, we'll take a

closer look at the key concepts of cloud

native, its benefits and use cases. Hi. I'm

Andrea Crawford and I'm with IBM Cloud.

Today we're going to talk about cloud

native apps. In the heritage world, we

have our lumpy, monolithic apps. And in

the new world, we have our microservices

living on the cloud. If we take a look at

this diagram here, we see we have cloud

infrastructure. This is your private, your

public, and your enterprise

infrastructure. Cloud native apps apply

to hybrid and multicloud situations. We

also have our scheduling and

orchestration layer. This layer is all

about control planes, like our kubernetes.

We also have our application and data

services layer. This layer is all about

backing services, and being able to

integrate our application code with

existing services that may be available

on other clouds, or even on-premise. We

have our application runtimes, these are

what we're traditionally, or

conventionally, known as middleware. And

over here, well, that's where we have our

cloud native apps. This is the sweet spot

right up here. So our application code is

actually designed, built, and delivered

very differently for cloud native, than

it would be for conventional, monolithic,

lumpy apps over here. Let's talk a

little bit about why cloud native apps

can actually leverage benefits like:

enabling innovation,

business agility, and most importantly -

from a technology perspective - the

commoditization of this solution stack

over here. As time has progressed and

technologies have matured and emerged, a

lot of the services are actually being

refactored lower down in this stack. This

means that core services are starting to

have a lower center of gravity, freeing

up innovation at this level over here.

So, what are our use cases for when to build

a cloud native app? Everything!

Everything that lives in the cloud

should have a cloud native app design

and approach. This means our application

code needs to be instrumented with

things like: standardized logging,

standardized events, and being able to

match those logging and events to a

standard catalog, that multiple microservices

and cloud native apps can use.

The last thing we want to do is have our

development squads have to figure out

what their log and event messages should

be. Let's standardize that, because we

want to be able to commoditize that as

well. We also need to have things like

distributed tracing. When we get over

into the microservices world over here,

we have a lot of moving parts. This means

we're going to need to leverage services

core to the system, like: load balancing,

service discovery, and routing. These are

the kinds of things that are

commoditized in this layer here, with

things like Istio, and with the emergence

of newer projects, like Knative. And so,

if we were to recognize the benefits for

cloud native apps and to sum it all up,

we are all about enterprise and

engineering at scale. In the next video

we'll take a look at DevOps.

Devops On Cloud

art of transcript. Skip to the end.

Development teams need to design, develop, deliver and run software as reliably and efficiently

as possible.

Operations teams need to identify and resolve problems as soon as possible by monitoring,

predicting failure, managing the environment, and fixing issues.

Combining development and operations with the ability to monitor and analyze and optimize

bottlenecks gives us DevOps—a collaborative approach where business owners and the
development,

operations, and quality assurance teams collaborate to continuously deliver software.

A DevOps approach applies agile and lean thinking principles to all stakeholders in an organization

who develop, operate, or benefit from the business’s software systems, including customers,

suppliers, partners.

By extending lean principles across the software supply chain, DevOps capabilities improve

productivity through accelerated customer feedback cycles, unified measurements and

collaboration across an enterprise, and reduced overhead, duplication, and rework.

Using the DevOps approach, developers can produce software in short iterations

on a continuous delivery schedule of new features and bug fixes in rapid cycles;

and businesses can seize market opportunities and reduce time to include customer feedback

in their products.

The DevOps process involves: Continuous Delivery, which is about delivering

small, well-designed, high-quality, increments of software to customers.

Continuous Integration; creating packaged builds of the code changes released as immutable

images; where immutable implies that when modifications are needed, the entire component

is replaced with an upgraded version.

Continuous Deployment, which involves progressing each new packaged build through the
deployment

lifecycle as rapidly as possible.

Continuous Monitoring; with tools that help developers understand the performance and

availability of their applications, even before they are deployed to production.

Delivery Pipeline; which is an automated sequence of steps that involves the stages of

Ideation, Coding, Building, Deploying, Managing, and Continuous Improvement; which loops back

to the Ideation phase in the delivery pipeline.

While DevOps can apply to applications anywhere, there is especially a compelling case for

DevOps when it comes to cloud-ready, and cloud-native applications.

DevOps and Cloud share a symbiotic relationship.

With its near limitless compute power and available data and application services, cloud

computing platforms come with their own risks and challenges.

DevOps’ tools, practices, and processes are helping tackle some of the complexities

and challenges posed by the cloud and allowing solutions to be delivered—quickly and reliably.

Let’s look at some core capabilities that DevOps provides to help building and running

applications in the cloud a lot more manageable: DevOps best practices make it possible to

programmatically provision servers, build middleware, install application code, and

fully automate the installation process in a way that is documented, repeatable, verifiable,

and traceable.

Application deployments often involve considerable complexity.

The DevOps’ practices of continuous integration and continuous deployment help create a fully

automated deployment pipeline, which is important all through the application development
lifecycle.

Cloud native applications form a complex distributed system with multiple moving parts,
independent

tech stacks, and rapid release cycles.

DevOps principles are essential to define how people work together to build, deploy,
and manage applications in a cloud native approach.

With the DevOps best practices of automated provisioning and continuous deployment, developers,

quality professionals, and other stakeholders can test in low-cost, production-like test

environments that were previously not available—enhancing both productivity and quality.

When systems are compromised or struggling to recover from natural disasters, DevOps

best practices make it possible to rebuild these systems quickly and reliably.

DevOps provides a powerful set of principles, practices, and tools to realize the full potential

of cloud-native computing, as well as for modernizing existing applications to leverage

cloud benefits.

In the next video, we’ll learn about application modernization.

APPLICATION MODERNISATION

Start of transcript. Skip to the end.

Many organizations have huge investments

in existing applications that are often

siloed in legacy systems and are very

difficult and expensive to update and

maintain. Modernizing these applications

can unlock great benefits for these

organizations such as accelerating their

digital transformations, enabling them to

take advantage of new technologies and

services, and becoming more responsive to

their customers' needs and changing

market dynamics. Cloud computing is one

of the three main ingredients in

Application Modernization. In the rest of

this video we will see how, and what else

Application Modernization entails. Hi, I'm

Eric Minick, with IBM Cloud, and I want to

talk about application modernization and

three huge transformations that have

been going on together. We've got

three things going on. They're

interrelated, and this is what we're

seeing this change in how we're doing

architecture, infrastructure, and our ways

of working - how we deliver. And if we go

back in time a little bit,

we saw applications that were

very monolithic. They were running on

physical servers And we used waterfall

style development where we'd have long

plans and we'd sa,y okay, this is gonna be

our planning phase, or development phase,

or testing phase, and we could plan out a

year as a project. And that's really what

we've gone away from. So if we look at

how most organizations are working today,

architecturally, they've got some sort

of distributed architecture. It's usually

related to like a service-oriented

architecture; the the big buzzwords a few

years ago. But some sort of distributed

architecture. We have a bunch of web

services. They're talking to each other.

We've got some databases on the backend.

[Music]

And then some front ends that kind of go

through all that. On an infrastructure

level, they're running on some sort of a

virtual machine, alright. So, we said we could

probably do better than having to order

a new server every time we have a new

service.

Let's virtualize this stuff, and we need

a little more density along the way. And

from a way of working,

you know, Agile development - pretty normal -

and then trying to figure out a little

bit of what happens downstream. So this

kind of takes us up to where a lot of

teams are today, but not really where

they're going. And so if we look at, kind

of, that next phase. We're taking another

pass at this service-oriented

architecture, and really shrinking the

sizes of the services, taking advantage

of the more dynamic infrastructure we

have. And we're calling these now

microservices. So we've

got a microservice architecture, very

small, very focused services, moving away

from a lot of the heavyweight XML based

communication we saw in SOA, towards

more rest based communication, things

like that. But same idea; let's keep

breaking into smaller and smaller pieces.

We have more independence of what we

ship. More rigor in saying this service

needs to be independent from another

service, so I can change these things by

themselves. On the infrastructure side -

cloud. It's pretty popular. And this could

be public cloud, this could also be

private cloud. I'm painting with a very

broad brush when I say cloud here.

Then from a delivery, in a way of working,

we could say that DevOps is really key.

And I would include in this, approaches

like site reliability engineering, SRE.

More the ways of working we have today.

Now that that's fine and interesting. But

what do these things have to do with

each other? I'd argue that what we're

really seeing is modernization in how

the applications are delivered, and how

they're built, and what they are.

While you could walk into any large

enterprise today and you'll find someone

who says we are going through a cloud

transformation. You'll often find

somebody says, "yes, I'm in charge of

leading the DevOps transformation." And

you'll walk into enterprise architecture

and they'll say, "yes, we are pushing

microservice architectures." Individuals think

that they're going through three

separate transformations. But they're

really tied. Right? If I'm doing

microservices, and I have new

microservices all the time.

In order to get a new microservice

up and running, I'm over here and I have

to order a new physical server, then

rack and stack it a couple months later.

I'm not gonna get any time to market

benefits. The resilience benefits that

I'm gonna normally look for from

microservices are gonna be modest, at best.

Microservices want cloud

infrastructure. You want to be able to

say, I've got a new microservice. Let me

put it in a container and just run that

container right now and scale that

dynamically. Similarly, cloud really likes

running microservices. The

benefits of being able to dynamically scale are

really cool when you have a lot of small

things that you might need few of, or a

lot of. It's not as interesting when I've

got a monolith that that isn't even

distributed. How do I scale that? I get a

bigger cloud server? Then all of this

is, kind of, baking in this idea of speed

and resiliency. And DevOps brings that

together; the developers who have

always wanted speed, the

operations people who've always wanted

that resiliency. They're going to be

programming that cloud. The

programmable infrastructure the cloud

provides, needs operations people who

understand resiliency, but bring some of

that development skill in. To really

take advantage of these new

infrastructures, the new

architectures, you need these new ways

of working. And you also are gonna say, if

this is going to give me time to market

benefits, I can't be back here,

and say we've got a one-year

project plan that we're just gonna

execute. I need to be able to be more

agile, and adapt in my planning and my

responsiveness to the business. I need to

better wire up my application so they

can be more easily monitored and more

resilient. We have to have the

application in a way that it knows when

one of these services is failing, and we

can spin up another. So this is really,

for me, fascinating - that you walk into

these organizations everywhere, and

they're undergoing these three different

transformations. But they're always doing

them together. And when they don't - it

doesn't quite work. So you've got these

three transformations going on at once.

And you'll hear us talk a lot about

application modernization.

See it written across the top here.

When I think of application

modernization, I think it's just this.

It's this transformation right here;

going from these kind of monoliths, or

service-oriented architectures, to micro-

services, adopting cloud, modernizing our

ways working towards DevOps and SRE.

that's AppMod (AM). It's a really

exciting time. And it's really great when

you're able to go after it in a holistic

fashion.