Key Concepts to Understand When Moving Over to the Cloud — Part 1 1

Moving from traditional IT (information technology) to the cloud can be overwhelming. There is so much information out there and can be difficult to know where to even begin.

In this post, I want to go over some key concepts to be aware of when moving over to the cloud. This is information I wish I knew before building out a worldwide application in the cloud. The concepts focus on the big picture of the cloud.

Trade Capital Expense for Variable Expense

One of the biggest changes in the cloud from a traditional setup is that the cost is not upfront anymore. The exception is if you’re doing a long-term contract to get a discount. The cost of running your services in the cloud is to pay for what you use. This removes the need for you to pick the right amount of machines to meet demand. You can use more or fewer machines when you need them.

4 Types of Services

Not all services in the cloud are the same. Some services require you to be more hands-on or be more hands-off. Cloud services are typically broken down into 4 types. They are

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): You manage the server (physical or virtual) and OS (operating system).
• Platform as a Service (PaaS): Someone else manages the underlying hardware and OS. You don’t need to know what resources you need to run your code. The resources will be provided for you. You will need to manage the resources after they are provisioned for you.
• Software as a Service (SaaS): Everything is taken care of for you and you worry about the software itself and how you want it.
• Function as a Service (FaaS): The idea is someone writes a functionality to do something (e.g. make a payment), which you can then use.

Shared Responsibilities

Security in the cloud is a shared responsibility between you and the cloud provider. Your cloud provider isn’t responsible for everything in the cloud. Depending on what type of services you use, the responsibility between you and the cloud provider will vary. However, in general, you’re responsible for security in the cloud while the cloud provider is responsible for the security of the cloud.

Services Can Reside in a Geographic Area

Not all services are available globally in the cloud. For example, a certain service might be bound to a single region (geographic location). If the data centers in that region are down, then your service will not be available. Now if you have the same service running in two different regions, if one of them goes down your service will still be available.

Understand Global Infrastructure

Independent of which cloud provider you’re using, they will have data centers across the world known as a region. It is important to understand where these data centers are in the world. Depending on the locations available, it can make the difference between your users having a poor or excellent experience.

Additionally, each region will most likely have at least one group of data centers known as an availability zone. Depending on your usage you might want more reliability by looking for regions that have more than one availability zone.

Availability Zone and Region relation

I hope this post was helpful to you. If you found this post helpful, share it with others so they can benefit too.

What was your experience like when working with the cloud for the first time?

Part 2 is available here.

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