Why Technical writers should understand "Cloud Abstraction"?

If you observe, you will notice that every layer of the system is getting separated as a component. For example, the operating system, memory, storage, Switches, database, storage, and Clustering, so on. Therefore, if any component fails, the other component within the network can continue to work seamlessly.

Cloud: Cloud is defined as the separation of the application from the underlying hardware.

Important:

Virtualization: Virtualization is just a component of Cloud computing

Why Technical should understand Cloud Abstraction?

Because there are three constituents’ components (Technologies) that the Technical writers need to know and understand:

1. Virtualization

2. Software-defined network (SDN)

3. Serverless Architecture (API services)

A. Virtualization

Virtualizations is defined as the separation of the operating system from the underlying hardware.

As a technical you need to be aware of the following:

1. Bare metal hypervisor - installing hypervisor on a dumb terminal. Which is Type Hypervisor

2. Hosted Hypervisor - Installing hypervisor on top of the Windows operating system - Hardware, Server software, Operating System, and Hypervisor. Which is also known as Type 2 Hypervisor

3. Management console - Virtualization is performed through the Management console only, using the IP address acquired from the bare metal system, to install and manage instances of an operating system, such as Windows Server, Linux, or Apple.

4. Storage area network (SAN)

5. Database clusters

6. Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) - Very important.

7. Redundancy - If a database server within the SAN environment fails, the data will still be available and can be accessed. Remember High Availability 99999s (Five 9)

A logical unit of multiple hard disks.

8. Failover - Redundancy array of inexpensive disk (RAID). You can remove, replace servers in the storage network to improve the quality of service.

9. Fault-Tolerant and many more.

10. Heartbeat: This a connection between the Backup Network-attached storage (NAS) and the primary NAS, which replicates and synchronous data in the real world. In case the Primary NAS fails the Heartbeat quickly promotes the secondary Backup server as the primary server. Therefore, remember the word "Heartbeat"

11. Replication server.

12. Load balancing

13. Multi-tenancy: Most of you must have known this. It is a single instance of software that serves multiple clients. Imagine, Hotmail, Google doc, Yahoo mail

Note: Clients are referred to as Tenants. Tenants could be an organization, client, user, workgroups, and so on.

B. Software-Defined network (SDN)

The software rules (setting up the configuration) and network devices, such as routers, switches, firewalls can be abstracted without manually configuring them.

Actually, the configuration rules are defined in Management Server. The router can be configured for computing using the available predefined configuration file. This is how AWS; AZURE compute works mostly. Pay as you use.

C. API - Serverless architecture

To login to the system, you need to enter your username and password - the value pair, ( you can consider as C2 level security). This credential is validated with the Active Directory services (ADS) - Remember, when pursuing Microsoft certification, you need to refer to ADS as Active Directory directory services in the windows environment. The ADS then sends the Access Control Key that specifies the permissions and role to the user of that client machine.

Question

How is the authentication performed in a serverless service environment,

Answer

The authentication is performed using services such as API.

You can log in from Windows or Linux to use the API service with functionality to validate and authenticate.

Note

If you do not understand cloud abstraction, it will be very difficult to communicate with the knowledge workers, developers, project managers (Microsoft, VMware, Citrus, and many more), and finally to sustain in the rapid technology advancement.

I have listed many items in each section, they are very critical in cloud computing.

What is the purpose of writing this article?

In the field of technical writing or technical communication, many writers do not necessarily get the opportunity to work in Virtualization, Software Defined Network, and so on. As technology evolves rapidly, many do not realize that a well-matured technology, for example, virtualization, does have challenges from new technology like Docker containers. But the writers should understand that Virtualization will coexist with Containers and therefore, it not late even to understand the earlier technology.

Every writer has the challenge of documenting on different projects, so you have to communicate with knowledge workers in the language of one business, and you need to keep a step towards understanding technology. Otherwise, the people would look you down. You cannot just write if you yourself are a novice user or you experience writer's block. Then how will you add more content or understand the domain in the first place?

Remember, Money is not the only criteria, knowledge, training, and skills together are important. I will add more topics in later sessions.