How Well Do You Know Your Basics in Cloud Computing?

How well do you know your basics?

I've been curious about Cloud Security and how it works. To get a handle on it, I decided to dive into it. I will be walking you through my learning journey and break the terms down into simpler terms.

Cloud Computing is an on-demand delivery of services that includes storing, processing, and sharing data over the Internet.

What makes the Cloud unique?

1. Scalability: This is the ability to add or remove resources from a system.

There are 2 types of scaling, Vertical, and Horizontal

• Vertical: Have you ever had a need to increase the storage of your computer from 4 GB to 16 GB or increase your drive storage from 15 GB to 1TB? This process is called Vertical scaling.
• Horizontal: In this case, instead of adding or removing a resource from a system, you decide to make a replica of the machine or server e.g. During peak shopping periods on Black Fridays, most E-commerce websites like Amazon experience huge traffic from customers. To handle the larger volume of customer requests without performance?or availability issues, more web servers are added, and the increased traffic is shared evenly across multiple servers instead of relying on one server that could crash.

2. Elasticity: This is the ability of a system to add, remove, or replicate a system dynamically also known as Auto scaling. E.g When the peak shopping periods are over, and the volume of customer requests has reduced, the auto scaler can remove one or more of the replicated web servers starting from the last server added based on the task given to the auto scaler. Note that each of the replicated servers is put together in a group called Target Group and not as an individual server, so the auto scaler sees all the servers in a Target group.

3. Agility: This is the ability of the system to add, remove, or replicate resources quickly to meet demands. E.g. As soon as there is large traffic on shopping websites, more servers are added, when traffic reduces, the number of servers reduces to accommodate business needs because those extra servers are not needed at that moment.

4. Fault Tolerance: This is the ability of the system to remain up and running during a component and service failure, a breach, or a disaster. Redundancy +1, saving data in different data centers e.g. having your 3 house keys saved in different places, you have one with you, you give one to your sister and another to your friend. When you misplace your key, you already have a solution in place, you can still have access to your house by getting one of the keys from your friend or sister.

5. Disaster Recovery: The ability to recover from a disaster quickly, this involves having backups and recovery plans in place e.g. saving all your bank transaction details on your Google Drive, even if you lose your phone or laptop, you will still have access to them.

6. High Availability: This is the ability to keep the system up and running for users at all times. e.g whenever customers want to shop on an e-commerce website, the site needs to always be available for users.

Thanks to my trainers for explaining each concept Smart Agbawo Emmanuel Enamejewa and Chinyere Ayogu

#DW-CloudSecurityDeveOpsTraining-Cohort-3