Not every computing model is equal. Learn the different types of the cloud!

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Nowadays, almost every business, big or small, uses a cloud technology service of some sort.

They all have one thing in common: the ability to use at least one computer-based business function, remotely over the Internet.

Elaborating on it can be a bit challenging at first, as everything has the name "cloud" in it!

Based on which, as well as what type of service a company chooses, each companies definition of the "cloud" changes completely. This makes each specific cloud unique.

Therefore, asking what type of cloud a given company uses is a loaded statement.

One company may run a cloud with most of their business functions using thousands of business-owned servers; another company may administer their own cloud without owning a single physical server.

Let's take a deep dive on how to understand the landscape!

Cloud vs cloud service

There is a difference!

By definition, regardless of the type of cloud, all involve a company paying for a?cloud service, which is any pay-as-you-go, cloud-based resource.

These are further broken down into their own categories; some brief examples of each type of cloud computing resource:

• IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service)?An example of?IaaS?would be a business paying Google to rent out a custom virtual server on their public cloud. This is when substitution of "bare-metal" physical hardware, such as a server, all its physical and network components are simulated or "virtualized" and offered as a service. The customer is responsible for maintaining the app, as well as the maintenance of the virtual server itself. Google only takes care of the physical hardware behind the scenes.
• PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service)?An example of?PaaS?would be a company renting out a blank virtual database server hosted by AWS on their public cloud services for use by company engineers to manage company data; the databases are maintained by Amazon themselves. The customer is responsible for managing and maintaining its company data and application code exclusively. AWS is responsible for the maintenance of the virtual server that hosts the databases, in addition to administering the physical hardware that runs the virtual servers.
• SaaS (Software-as-a-Service)?An example of?SaaS?would be a company paying Microsoft for a subscription to use their cloud-based Office 365 office productivity suite. The customer is responsible for its company data while using the office suite, and nothing more. Microsoft is responsible for the writing and maintenance of Office 365, maintenance of the virtual servers hosting Office 365, and administering all the physical hardware behind the scenes as well.

Public cloud

This is the first type of cloud in mind to the average person when asked what the cloud is.

Public cloud providers are, for the most part, owned by large companies:

• Amazon
• Microsoft
• Google
• Oracle
• Alibaba
• IBM

Only companies of this magnitude can provide the resources and scale to meet the demand of customers of other small, medium, and large organizations.

Cloud services are offered by a singular 3rd party company; any services purchased by a business, and data used and stored, are, at the end of the day, owned and maintained by a cloud provider.

A company using cloud resources hosted on the public cloud is able to enjoy the many benefits that cloud computing provides:

• Pay-as-you-go usage
• Metric-based usage limits
• Hardened security posture with best practices
• Access to the latest technologies
• Global, low latency resource availability
• Systems that scale to demand
• IT resource creations on-demand

However, only newer start-up companies or companies with a strong and cutting-edge technology culture are exclusively in the public cloud, as many existing companies already own and use IT equipment in their environment.

Private cloud

A private cloud, like a public cloud, involves computing resources used in a distributed manner over the Internet.

An example would be a company virtualizing their in-house servers using VMWare, and allowing system access over the Internet for company use.

Companies needing private clouds likely have on-premise IT infrastructure already but have the need to have systems that are designed to be scalable, elastic and fault-tolerant, and remotely accessible like other public cloud systems.

The main difference between private and public clouds is that private clouds have the physical IT infrastructure either hosted exclusively on-premise or hosted on isolated, exclusively allocated resources hosted by an independent, 3rd party cloud provider company.

Certain situations may cause a customer to opt for a "private" cloud solution.

This can be due to a variety of reasons:

• Regulatory requirements
• Business-critical intellectual property
• Medical records
• Protected financial data
• Confidential documents
• Compliance needs
• Sensitive PII (personally identifiable information)

Hybrid cloud

Hybrid cloud environments involve a combination of "on-premise" resources (private cloud) directly connected and used together with cloud resources hosted on the Internet by a cloud provider (public cloud).

An example would be a company-owned server room, backed up and ready for use by a completely identical server fleet hosted on AWS.

Believe it or not, most companies that use cloud services would fall under this type of cloud environment.

This is because prior to the recent boom of the cloud industry, companies had to either buy or rent their own IT equipment.

Migration is a risky, expensive, and long process; therefore many companies are slow to completely shift over to the full public cloud.

Multi-cloud

Multi-cloud environments are when a company opts for using cloud services in?more?than one company.

This would technically mean that a cloud solution can possibly be multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud.

In general, most companies opt for using only one particular cloud provider; this is usually due to the complexity of implementing best practices.

Certain companies with larger resources may use an environment that implements cloud services offered by more than one 3rd party company, to take advantage of the benefits each cloud provider has.

An example of this would be a company choosing to run their mission-critical database instances on Microsoft Azure, while connected to a series of virtual servers hosted by Google Cloud Platform, all of which are monitored by tools hosted in AWS.

Possible reasons for this include:

• Preventing being locked into one cloud provider
• Highest possible cost-savings for a given use-case
• Disaster recovery in the event of cloud provider major outage
• Higher performance, fault-tolerance
• Use of the most bleeding-edge cloud solutions
• Lower latency over globally-distributed workloads

This is not without its difficulties, as multi-cloud environments tend to be highly complex, and expensive to maintain as there are few engineering teams that are equipped with the necessary skills to completely master?one?cloud, let alone?many?of them!

Because of this, multi-cloud is considered a bleeding-edge, niche solution.

written by Christian Talavera