Cloud computing builds on virtualization and containerization to give organizations flexible alternatives to maintaining costly on-premises infrastructure. Modern businesses typically operate across a spectrum of service models, from fully local systems to colocation, IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.
Cloud Computing Overview
All this virtualization has really opened the doors to allow cloud computing.
Back in the mid-90s, let's say '95, really the primary way that we would roll out new systems is we'd buy a server, roll it out on bare metal and set up those services. Then hypervisors came along. Well, they'd been around for a while, but they became more prevalent around the 2005 era, so we started getting hypervisors and started rolling that out. Same thing with container services: they became more popular in like 2013, 2014, that's when container services started getting really popular. By the way, these are all technologies that have been out there for a long time. They just became popular a little bit later.
What it really did is open the doors for cloud computing. A lot of people started saying, well, why are we going to roll out this whole infrastructure right here when we can start utilizing somebody else's efforts in creating data centers and creating stuff? So it really opened the doors to have cloud computing.
I've worked with a lot of schools and small businesses in the past, and they have some sort of network server room that has the server that has all the services running. Of course, this server room gets hot, so we need air conditioning in it to cool it down. We're also concerned about power, so we need some sort of UPS, some sort of backup power system, to make sure that server is up and running. It also needs connectivity to the internet, so I'm going to provide some sort of internet service provider connection, and I want redundancy with it, so I'm going to have multiples there. By the way, I probably also need redundancy with the UPS. Maybe I have some sort of generator that can run if something goes offline. And also the UPSs, maybe I need to double those and double the AC unit.
So now, as you can see here, I start creating this redundancy and I create stuff so that we make sure that services are up and running, and this gets very costly. Costly from a time perspective of me managing it all, and costly from an implementation standpoint.
Now if we put this in the hands of professionals and move these services, at least the ones that we can, up into the cloud, it puts it in somebody else's hands to manage all of that. And now me, as just a single IT person that's coming out to some of these clients every other week, I'm only visiting them every other week, now it puts it in an environment that can be much easier to manage.
A lot of times we do a hybrid with this. We have cloud services that are running up in the cloud, and then we also have local services, and sometimes those even coordinate and communicate and are linked. I've had many times where I've had local services that then get replicated up into the cloud. This is a great solution, because then I have some local services that provide services for the local people within the company, but I also have some redundancy up in the cloud, and I don't have to buy a whole new site for that redundancy.
This is all to say that there are a lot of different models with that. We started out with pretty much most people having some sort of on premise. Now there are companies that came out and said, well, let's take care of the infrastructure need, the underlying data center with the power and the AC, we'll provide all that for you. So that's collocation, and then they're responsible for those elements of it, and then what we'd do is go buy the networking and the storage and the hardware, buy the rest of it and set it up there.
But then there came out other models like infrastructure as a service, where they took care of more, and then platform as a service, where they took care of more, and then SaaS, which really has been around for a long time but is to a much greater degree now.
So really, what is all of this? I'm going to get into more of this in other lessons, but for now just realize that what we have now is this whole array, this whole different spectrum of services that we can hire out to have done for us. What we hire out might depend on what service it is and how critical it is and what our needs are, and it definitely is going to affect how we're going to go about doing business from a security standpoint. But ultimately businesses nowadays usually have a combination of these working within their infrastructure, and they have to manage all of these different relationships. Sometimes it's on premise, sometimes it's collocation or infrastructure as a service or platform as a service. They're managing all of this.
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