Cloud Computing, Part I - Introduction (What and Why)

Cloud had been one of the buzz words of technology people for a long time, however it has been in the agenda of business users recently if you consider the current environment where businesses must be agile enough to respond on time and smart enough to adjust their position to the changes happening very frequently and in a very short period of time. 

I have been writing technical articles and blog posts to share my knowledge with people interested since I have started my career and learning the new concepts, their use case which is a "never-ending-story" in technology and development world. This is because new technologies are invented or derived from each other so fast-because of the demanding world-, you have to be proactive to learn and try them; and decide to or not to use it. However, it shouldn't be too late once you apply it. (Your competitors might have already done that or it's too late, new version of the technology is published :) 

"I am using cloud, of course"

Cloud is one of these areas, in fact a very large concept which has many dimensions. Because of this when somebody tells "we are using cloud", it might mean one of many possibilities of the "cloud scenarios and usage". But which one? How they use it? Can they extend it or use it better? are the questions to be asked.

You cannot think "Business and Technology" separately

Another thing is, it's not only technical people's job to learn and know cloud (of course they should know better than the business users). Because technology and business are working so closely now, it's a necessity for business users to learn some of these concepts. This is because business decisions are very much affected from the choices in the technology architecture and vice versa. This is something that I see very important in building the strategy, something we can call #techforbusiness or #technologyforbusiness . Pay attention to FinTech companies where business model is based on technology and how small changes in their usage of technology make results to improve significantly. 

!! Think of investing in areas to contribute the result more effectively, stop insisting on keeping the status quo otherwise it might be too late. 

Cloud computing can make a huge difference and should take a very important portion in these decisions; for this reason I see it very important not only technically but also from a business perspective.

I will publish some cloud related posts and try to shed a light on the subject hoing that it will help. In fact, I have published some fragments (will share the links and connect these subjects to the ones that I will publish in the future). Please feel free to contact and recommend if you would like to see other topics connected. 

AGENDA

The first one of these posts as an introduction, the agenda will not be very technical, I will try to explain what and why of cloud computing:

• What is cloud and cloud computing, definition and terms
• What are the reasons we need to prefer cloud (Why Cloud)

Next chapters; 

I, then plan to publish posts on the topics like

• Deployment models of cloud (public, private, hybrid etc.)
• Cloud use cases / scenarios
• Services that cloud providers / hyperscalers provide
• Technical details about cloud offerings & services for architects/developers

Let’s start with the subject:

What is cloud computing 

Many definitions from the cloud service providers are done which emphasizes the same important points. From simple to complex: 

o  Cloud computing is the delivery of different services through the Internet, including data storage, servers, databases, networking, and software.

o  Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services—including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence—over the Internet (“the cloud”) to offer faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale.

o  Cloud computing is the delivery of on-demand computing resources (including servers, databases, storage, platforms, infrastructure, applications, etc.) over the Internet. Cloud computing can be used on a pay-as-you-go basis, which means you pay just for what you need.

o  Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centres and servers, you can access technology services, such as computing power, storage, and databases, on an as-needed basis from a cloud provider

Therefore, cloud computing is nothing "new" in terms of what it provides (sometimes it's new though- I will explain in future posts) however it's new in how it provides which is a game-changer in business. 

The important points for all these definitions are the keywords like "over Internet", "on-demand", "pay-as-you-go", "flexible" and "economies of scale" which needs to be considered. These keywords at the same time defines why business should and must use "Cloud".

Why cloud?

• Agile - On Demand - Flexible & Scalable

Businesses that once mapped digital strategy in one- to three-year phases must now scale their initiatives in a matter of days or weeks now. (Think about the last year with COVID-19). In this unique moment, IT can lead the way to enable companies to learn and progress more quickly than ever before. Businesses and companies have to respond more quickly then ever to the changes, new regulations, new players..

In order to enable this, cloud service providers give you the flexibility to add computing resources (CPU, memory, storage etc.) or other services from web-based panels within seconds with a few clicks which was not possible in traditional systems. In this case you can add new servers to your application and handle the user load in busy periods, then release the resources once they are unnecessary. This can even be done automatically within the rules that you define where you always feel safe to handle the load without thinking about the lack of resources; and you can focus on your core business decisions.

This is also true for investing in a new technology areas (new physical technologies such as server, storage technologies or in software such as IoT, blockchain, machine learning etc). These cloud providers mostly switch to these technologies earlier than traditional businesses and supply these tested-and-ready for you as a service on demand when you require them.

• Payment Models : Subscription / Pay-As-You-Go

 In cloud computing you are not supposed to make the investment in the beginning and pay for unused capacity or licenses. Most of the cloud services, infrastructure, licenses are subscription based. You can even use a model where you only pay for exact time for the usage of the service.

For instance, you can use or design a function to make a complex calculation that needs a very big computing power but you don't want to make the investment because you / your users only need this function for total of half an hour during the weekdays. Why invest and pay in advance, allocate resources for a service that you don't use 98% of the time?

Instead, you pay for "exactly how many seconds" that you use for the service, and whenever required.

Or start with a subscription model for a small capacity and add resources and extend your subscription once your capacity requirements increase. This is similar to adding a new user to your licenses. 

This model also allows companies switching IT cost structure from a CapEx based model to OpEx based one which is mostly a preferred method for allocation, managing P&L and budgets more effectively.

• Unlimited Resources - Unlimited Expertise - Reliability 

In most of the cloud computing services, you don't worry about the physical infrastructure or limits of the usage (you don't order a storage and wait it for 4 weeks to start your project). The cloud service provider has gigantic size of computing power ready for you to start within seconds. 

Another thing is, because there are hundreds of experts working for them in different areas of managing this infrastructure such as networking, security, monitoring, auditing etc.), you don't have to worry about hiring an expert for each of these areas.

CIOs' and IT's mission: Manage the expertise, focus on innovation, focus more on strategic decisions and benefits.

Just an example to show the investment figures in one particular area; one of the cloud providers invest 1 billion USD in order to prevent customers from cyber-attacks.

Up-time, SLAs and reliability is another important point to consider. With respect to this cloud service providers use the principle of redundancy to guarantee a 7x24 high level of reliability.

• Global Coverage - Accessibility / Many Locations - Ready for Disasters

 Many of the businesses today are global having branches, production and distribution facilities, businesses in different countries or "planning" to provide services or make sales globally/online which needs the IT infrastructure to be provided in many different locations. (services might be different depending on the location & regulations as well).

Think of a scenario where your business will sell products in another country and you make the arrangement physical investment. With cloud services it will take a very small amount of time to replicate your current Internet store to a new location in another continent, serve the users from there with the required capacity, requirements and the load. The level of service you will get is the same and your business is up within hours depending on the complexity.

Another point is that as these services and infrastructure is accessible over the Internet (of course within the security policy of your company), you can expand your services to "anybody" or access from "any device" that has the Internet access.

With the same approach you can have operations in one country / continent and have disaster centres in another place which is 10000 kms away from the main one.

• Usage of Latest Technology / Industry Standards - Collaboration - Easy to Integrate 

Cloud providers are investing in the latest technologies and industry standards; they test, improve these assets and provide them as a service to their customers who then use these as enabler for their core businesses. It is easier and more effective than your IT department to handle these unnecessarily. 

This is another point where IT participates the strategic part of the business with the innovation other than being operational.

As current environment forces us to do so, many departments, locations and organizations therefore applications need to be working together as one unit in order to provide better services to our customers; which means integrations are one of the most important parts of the setup like a central nerve system. Having this kind of setup is also one of the most painful parts of the designed systems and one of the most failed parts of the projects.

Another advantage of the cloud is that from the beginning, cloud services are designed to have this fact in mind. They are designed to be integrated to on-premises (customer's own systems) or other cloud services out-of-the-box, provide many integration services and therefore it's easier/ quicker/ effective to collaborate many applications, systems and users together within a complex business environment with the cloud-based structure.

Although this(cloud computing) looks like having a more complex environment and more integration points; maintainability, agility and the options that it provides you will pay in the very short term depending on the requirements.

To sum up the benefits, what I can say is; building these infrastructure, business models and services are not easy or one-time job but we have to start anyway. As some of the providers are in the cloud business for more than 15 years having lots of experience (good and bad), I ask myself the question of "why reinvent the wheel" rather letting them do their part. I then can focus on my core business, focus on value added decisions & innovation and request more from them whenever necessary. 

The original post of this article can be accessible from here

You can also reach my Linkedin article about cloud service models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS.. ) from this link.

In the next part I will write about deployment models (private, public, hybrid.. cloud) which is one of the key parts of cloud strategy and architecture. 

RESOURCES

• Cloud Computing Definition - Investopedia https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cloud-computing.asp
• What Is Cloud Computing? A Beginner's Guide | Microsoft Azure https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/overview/what-is-cloud-computing/
• What is Cloud Computing? - Amazon Web Services - AWS https://aws.amazon.com/what-is-cloud-computing/
• What is Cloud Computing? Why Move to the Cloud? - Alibaba ... https://www.alibabacloud.com/knowledge/what-is-cloud-computing
• Google Cloud overview | Overview - https://cloud.google.com/docs/overview