As you probably know, I'm a huge student and huge fan of cloud technology.
I'm super excited right now to talk to you about cloud fundamentals, basic concepts.
Let's turn to the whiteboard and let's answer the question what is cloud?
I mean, really, what does it mean to be cloud tech?
Everyone's claiming to be cloud tech from a marketing perspective.
But if we turn to the National Institute of Standards and Technologies, they identify five characteristics
that really make cloud tech.
Cloud tech.
The first one is and I'm not giving these in any particular order, but it's on demand, self-service.
And if I could spell self service.
And what's so amazing about this is this could be like an entire data warehouse.
We can go into something like an AWB and we can point and click and build a data warehouse in seconds.
This is on demand self-service, this kind of on demand access to incredible resources.
We never had this before, right?
I mean, we could engage in some kind of big contract in order to gain the technology, but we'd be
locked in for years and it would take six months to get the tech and this kind of on demand push button
self-service just didn't exist before cloud.
Another big thing that makes cloud cloud is there needs to be intense resource pooling.
So even if we're a private organization building our own private cloud, we're going to have these blade
servers typically, and they're going to be able to run thousands of virtual machines.
So it's this incredible sharing of resources that goes on with cloud.
What's another thing that makes cloud?
Cloud?
Well, there needs to be a real accurate, measured service.
This is often referred to as metered service.
Why am I having such problem spelling today?
It's weird.
Anyways, measured service.
So we know when.
Let's say we're doing a private cloud and our R&D department is going crazy inside of our private cloud
spinning up VMs, we need to be able to do something called a charge back to them.
We need to be able to let that department know how much they're costing us in cloud resources.
Now, what most people think of when they think of measured service, and it's why I gave a private
cloud example most people think of public cloud exclusively and their big bill that they get from IWC
or Azure or Google Cloud.
But no, the measured service is a cloud characteristic that could apply to private clouds as well.
What is the fourth thing that makes cloud?
Cloud, and I hope I remember all five are this is going to be really embarrassing.
The fourth I remember it is rapid elasticity.
Now, what does elasticity mean?
Well, it's related to scalability, right?
Scalability says how well can your solution scale?
In other words, can it grow dynamically with ease as demand is increasing?
That scalability we love that elasticity is even better because the resources can be increased dynamically
based on demand, and then they can be reduced dynamically based on demand and increased again and reduced.
So growing and shrinking the infrastructure in an automated fashion is what rapid elasticity is all
about.
And this is another characteristic that makes technology cloud centric and really representative of
the cloud.
All right.
There is a fifth one.
Let me come up with it here.
On demand, self-service, resource pooling, measured services, elasticity.
Aha.
I got it.
Broad network access.
So we need to be able to get to the cloud resources from absolutely anywhere that we have a network
interface connection.
And so of course we really should consider these five parameters when we're evaluating a service that
claims to be cloud.
Now let's discuss the very popular as a service models of cloud.
You need to know the.
And I like to start the discussion with software as a service and a very early example of this, which
was Hotmail.
Yeah, Hotmail was one of the first software as a service entries.
As you know, it does email and it still does it for my wife, who has a Hotmail account.
Yeah, it's email and it's software as a service.
And by the way, guess who bought this when?
Shortly after came out.
Microsoft?
Yeah.
They paid millions and millions and millions.
Something like 300 of them.
And at the time, many, many decades ago, or at least three decades ago, I suppose now, that was
a lot of money Microsoft recognized, oh, my gosh, this is going to be potentially an exchange killer.
Microsoft Exchange at the time was the number one way to do email.
And they realized Microsoft did, Oh my gosh, this email is a service in the cloud.
It's a wonderful thing.
We got to buy that Hotmail now.
We are so used to software as a service today, aren't we?
Hotmail, Google Mail.
I cloud all these mail services in the cloud.
They're all software as a service.
What is so great about it for I.T. departments is that they don't have to worry about any of the infrastructure.
Right.
They can go ahead and have their users sign up for a Hotmail account and they don't have to worry about
any of the infrastructure supporting the email.
Now, the next as a service that we need to discuss is platform as a service.
This is really geared at the developers in your organization.
You see they can go up to Azure, which started out as only a platform, as a service offering, by
the way.
Now it can do everything, but back when it first began, it was really a platform as a service offering.
And what the dev staff could do is they could go up there and they had all of the tools, all of the
operating systems, everything they needed to do their development.
They could even deploy the finished application right from that cloud.
So notice they're doing more with the infrastructure than we did in software as a service.
But there is still a ton of the infrastructure that's automated for them that they don't have to worry
about.
Now, the ultimate like move to the cloud might be considered infrastructure as a service because now
your I.T team is going to be responsible for maybe the virtual machines that are being used.
Maybe the team is responsible for the apps that sit on top of those virtual machines.
Maybe we're putting virtual security devices in the cloud that are going to protect those applications.
Maybe we're building root tables and subnets and we're adding gateways.
You get the idea.
We are doing everything that we would in a quote normal unquote i.t.
Environment.
We're just doing it in the cloud.
Notice a lot of organizations will kind of consider these stepping stones, right?
They'll start out with platform as a service and then they'll start offering some software as a service
and then they might consider a full blown infrastructure as a service type of deployment model.
Now, speaking of deployment models, how are we going to implement cloud?
Well, we could do everything privately.
In-house.
That's right.
We could build our own A, B, C company cloud, and we could offer cloud services for our organization's
employees.
Or we could go public.
Public cloud would be one of the biggies like IWC or Azure or Google Cloud Platform.
And yeah, this is calling upon the public cloud for its services and you guessed it, the most popular
deployment model today.
It's hybrid.
This is the most popular model today.
If you look at, oh, my gosh, any company today of substantial size, they're doing their own private
cloud stuff.
And what they can't handle themselves they're relying on public cloud for.
Maybe it's archiving their old tape backups.
Yeah, NWS is perfect for that.
And so maybe that's what they're calling upon.
IWC for.
So what is a fourth type?
If we have private cloud and hybrid cloud and public cloud, is there a fourth type?
There is, and it is a community cloud.
The great example of this is cloud backup.
This is the government US government's employee's cloud site and it is brought together by a whole bunch
of different cloud vendors.
So any time you have organizations combining their cloud efforts, we call this deployment model community
cloud.
Well, I know this was a lot when it comes to basic cloud concepts, we're not even done.
But I'll stop for now.
I hope your brains not exploding.
Watch this video a couple of times if you need to.
You'll get all this down pat.
It's not hard and it is stuff we just have to know in today's I.T. landscape.
Well, in the next video, I want to talk to you.
We'll stay on the whiteboard, actually, because I love the whiteboard.
I want to talk to you about something called the shared responsibility model.
It's critical you understand this when it comes to cloud.
I'll see you then.