Cloud Computing
Refers to the on-demand delivery of IT resources and applications via the Internet
What does ‘cloud computing’ allow for?
- Ability to access data centers and its resources via the Internet — allowing to scale based on actual needs
- Responding quickly to changing market conditions — facilitating scalability, agility, and innovation
- Ease of access to new resources — helps to be more agile and innovative while spending less time focusing on your infrastructure
What do ‘virtual and automatable resources’ allow for?
Allow for comparative testing using different types of instances, storage, or configuration (ex. AWS CloudFormation)
AWS Cloud helps with:
- Reducing risk
- Scalability
- Agility
- Elasticity
- Reliability
- Security of data
What does ‘reducing risk’ mean?
Insisting on results while the investment is being made and you pivot as soon as desired results aren’t being shown
How do you reduce security risk?
Test often, patch quickly, and respond to incidents immediately
Scalability
The ability to resize your resources as necessary
Benefits of ‘scalability’
Customers can:
- Adapt their consumption of services to meet seasonal requirements
- Launch new services or products
- Accommodate new strategic directions
Three main factors of ‘agility’
- Increasing speed
- Ease of experimentation — can lead to discovery of innovations and new configurations
- Cultivating a culture of innovation
Elasticity
Power to scale computing resources up or down based on demand
What does ‘elasticity’ allow for?
- Quickly deploy new applications and instantly scale up as workloads grow while shutting down resources that are not required
- Ability to use AWS tools such as Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing
- Efficiencies of scale
Efficiencies of scale
Allowing customers to use innovative services and cutting-edge technology without having to go through multiple procurement cycles and expensive evaluations
Reliability
Ability of a system to recover from IaaS failures
What does ‘reliability’ include?
- An architecture and systems in place with a well-planned foundation that handles change in demand, detects failures, and has self-automation capabilities
- AWS allowing organizations to achieve greater flexibility and capacity while reducing uncertainty of forecasting hardware needs — difficult for on-premise solutions to match
- AWS Regions
AWS Regions
Amazon data centers in geographic regions that have multiple isolated locations known as Availability Zones
Availability Zones
Consist of one or more discrete data centers with each having redundant power, networking, and connectivity capabilities housed in separate facilities
What do ‘availability zones’ allow for?
- Ability for organizations to place resources in multiple locations and operate production applications and databases that are more highly available, fault-tolerant, and scalable than is possible from just one data center
- The structure of these are intentional and directly related to Fault-Tolerance
Fault-Tolerance
Systems can remain operational even if some of its components fail
What does ‘fault-tolerance’ allow for?
Its high availability ensures systems are functioning and accessible while downtime is minimized as much as possible without the need for human intervention
What does ‘security of data’ include?
- AWS allows complete control and ownership of your data — including regions data is stored and encrypted
- AWS provides the ability to continually monitor IT resources and spot changes at once
- Security policies can be built into the infrastructure since AWS assets are programmable resources
