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Cloud Based Services & Management
Overview
Cloud services are infrastructure, platforms, or software that are hosted by third-party providers and made available to users through the internet.
Cloud services facilitate the flow of user data from front-end clients (e.g., users’ servers, tablets, desktops, laptops—anything on the users’ ends), through the internet, to the provider’s systems, and back. Cloud services promote the building of cloud-native applications and the flexibility of working in the cloud. Users can access cloud services with nothing more than a computer, operating system, and internet connectivity.
Clouds are IT environments that abstract, pool, and share scalable resources across a network. Clouds enable cloud computing, which is the act of running workloads within a cloud environment. Clouds are a type of PaaS, because hardware and an application software platform is provided by another party.
How do cloud services work?
Like all other IT solutions, cloud services rely on hardware and software. However, unlike traditional hardware and software solutions, users don’t need anything other than a computer, network connection, and operating system to access cloud services.
Cloud infrastructure
When supplying users with a cloud infrastructure, cloud services providers detach computing capabilities from hardware components, such as separating:
Processing power from central processing units (CPUs)
- Active memory from random access memory (RAM) chips
- Graphics processing from the graphics processing units (GPUs)
- Data storage availability from datacenters or hard drives
This abstraction is typically accomplished through virtualization and virtual machines. Once separated, the storage, compute, and networking components are provided to users through the internet as infrastructure—or IaaS. This kind of cloud service has led to the rise of cloud storage, which stores big data as part of the Internet of Things (IOT). RackSpace is an example of an IaaS provider.
Cloud platforms
Cloud service providers can also use their hardware resources to create cloud platforms, which are online environments where users can develop code or run apps. Building a cloud platform requires more than just abstracting a computer’s capabilities from its hardware components—like when providing cloud infrastructure. Providing a cloud platform requires additional levels of development to incorporate technologies like containerization, orchestration, application programming interfaces (APIs), routing, security, management, and automation. User experience design (UX) is also an important consideration in order to create a navigable online experience.
Cloud platforms are a type of PaaS. And if the infrastructural components holding up the PaaS are highly scalable and sharable, it might be considered a cloud. The best examples of PaaS clouds include public clouds and managed private clouds.
Public cloud providers
Public cloud providers abstract their own infrastructure, platforms, or apps from hardware they own; pool them into data lakes; and share them with many tenants. They can also offer public cloud services, like API management, cloud-based operating systems, or libraries of development templates known as frameworks. Some popular public clouds include Alibaba Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and IBM Cloud.