Cloud and Datacenter Architecture

Question 1

Scalability

Answer 1

• Costs involved in supplying more of the service linearly
• If costs more than double for twice the users, it is less scalable
• Horizontal/scaling out: adding more nodes
• Vertical/scaling up: adding resources to each node

Question 2

Elasticity

Answer 2

• Systems ability to handle changes in demand in real time

- Also able to reduce costs when demand is low

Question 3

Resouce pooling

Answer 3

• Resources are not dedicated to single customer

Question 4

Virtualization

Answer 4

• Provisioning resources using management software rather than hardware

Question 5

Public Cloud Model

Answer 5

• Service offered to cloud consumers or tenants
• Subscriptions or pay as you go financing
• Often provide low tier services free of charge
• Risks from shared resources involve performance and security

Question 6

Hosted Private

Answer 6

• Hosted by a third party exclusive use for one org

- More secure and better performance but more expensive

Question 7

Private

Answer 7

• Owned by org
• One business unit often manages cloud services
• Greater control
• Often banking of government

Question 8

Community

Answer 8

• Several orgs share costs of hosted private or fully private cloud

Question 9

Hybrid

Answer 9

• A combination of the other cloud models

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Question 10

IaaS

Answer 10

Infrastructure as a Service

• Provisioning servers, load balancers, SANs, etc. quickly.
• Renting as needed from service providers data center

Question 11

SaaS

Answer 11

Software as a Service

• Access sofrware on vendors servers with Pay as you go or lease agreement.
• Virtual infrastructure allows provisioning on demand quickly
• Tested and developed in cloud without needing to be deployed on user computers
• 365, Salesforce, Gsuite

Question 12

PaaS

Answer 12

Platform as a Service

• Somewhere between SaaS and Iaas
• Deploys servers and storage but provides webapplication/database platform on top
• Oracle or MS SQL or MySQL
• Platform would not be configured to do anything
• Your own developers would need to create software that runs using platforms like CRM or e-commerce
• Provider is responsible for integrity of platform components

Question 13

DaaS

Answer 13

Desktop as a Service

- Removes need for org to deploy and maintain client PCs and software installs

Question 14

API

Answer 14

Application Programming Interface

• Simplest way to access cloud services
• Can also be implemented with VPN
• Can suffer from performance issues from latency and bandwidth throttling
• Should not be a solution for mission critical or high volume applications

Question 15

Internet/VPN Connection

Answer 15

• Connecting to cloud services over website or API
• VPN can be used if supported by cloud provider
• Cost effective and easy to implement for distributed users
• Can suffer from poor performance and latency from the public internet

Question 16

Colocation/Private direct

Answer 16

• A direct link to the data center
• Or customer infrastructure in Cloud provider data center
• Better for orgs with more centralized operations where connection to cloud can be from main HQ

Question 17

IaC

Answer 17

Infrastructure as Code

- Infrastructure management where automation and orchestration to replace manual configuration

Question 18

Snowflake System

Answer 18

• System with unique build or configuration

- Inconsistency creates security issues and problems as scripts fail because of configuration differences

Question 19

Automation

Answer 19

• configuration and building done by code
• Imperative: require precise steps to follow to achieve configuration. Similar to scripting languages
• Declarative: Take desired configuration as input and leave details to implementation platform

Question 20

Orchestration

Answer 20

• Performing a series of automated tasks

- Steps must take place in the correct sequence taking dependencies into account

Question 21

Cloud Responsibility Matrix

Answer 21

• Identifying responsibilities you and the provider are taking in SLA