2013 was the year where the clients have embraced the cloud solutions, and several cloud patterns have crystallized and were validated through successful clients engagements.
There are several cloud solutions offerings, including open source. Examples come from Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, Rackspace, open source (OpenStack) and the list continues...
What are the benefits of using a cloud? It's a way to externalize the tasks/jobs of hardware/software administration, maintenance and support by delegating these to other entities along with all the requirements that need to be solved through these activities (hosting, provisioning, availability, security, scalability, monitoring, etc). It also might provide access to third party software using SOA.
On cloud usage patterns, a few approaches have been explored. One could have public clouds where cloud services are being offered to external clients, or private clouds used by singular entities.
The public clouds have been diversifying their offerings, and a few usage patterns have emerged:
- IaaS or Infrastructure as a Service. It's basically a way to make computing power available to clients. One common way to achieve this is through virtualization software, where the clients get access to virtual images where they could install/configure software of their choice. Depending on the business case, this could be actually cheaper for clients because they are freed from buying and administering the hardware and OSes. Through agreed SLAs, the clients usually know what to expect regarding the services they receive.
- PaaS or Platform as a Service. The provider delivers a computing platform, where programming language execution environments, web servers and databases are available. This builds on top of IaaS by providing the additional software required to build and run applications.
- SaaS or Software as a Service. In addition to PaaS services, the clients are provided access to application software and services as well. This might be in the form of SOA or other related services, and/or perhaps third party software such as Microsoft Office, Exchange and others. The clients are able to deploy they applications to the cloud, make use of cloud infrastructure and platform, deployed software, as well as any SOA related end points made available by the cloud provider.
We will talk about Patterns for Big Data & Analytics in Cloud next
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