Short Introduction to Cloud Computing

In this chapter, you will learn the basics of cloud computing and will be presented with the core foundations of cloud infrastructure technologies. You will learn about the as-a-service solutions such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), and Containers as a Service (CaaS). You will be presented with the basics of cloud standards, Development and Operations (DevOps), continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD), and microservices. A base knowledge of the cloud will offer at least a basic introduction to AWS, Azure, and other cloud solutions. By the end of this chapter, we will also introduce you to technologies such as Ansible and Kubernetes. This chapter will provide a concise theoretical introduction that will be the foundation for the following three cloud-related chapters, which will provide you with important practical knowledge on the many solutions presented here.

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Technical requirements

No special technical requirements are needed as this chapter is a purely theoretical one. All you need is a desire to learn about cloud technologies.

Introduction to cloud technologies

The term “cloud computing,” or the simple alternative “cloud,” is not missing from any tech enthusiast’s or Information Technology (IT) professional’s vocabulary these days. You don’t even have to be involved in IT at all to hear (or even use) the term “cloud” relatively often. Today’s computing landscape is changing at a rapid pace, and the pinnacle of this change is the cloud and the technologies behind it. According to the literature, the term “cloud computing” was used for the first time in 1996, in a business plan from Compaq (https://www.technologyreview.com/2011/10/31/257406/who-coined-cloud-computing/).

Cloud computing is a relatively old concept, even though it was not referred to using this term right from the beginning. It is a computing model that was used from the early days of computing. Back in the 1950s, for example, there were mainframe computers...

Introducing IaaS solutions

IaaS is the backbone of cloud computing. It offers on-demand access to resources, such as compute, storage, network, and so on. The CSP uses hypervisors to provide IaaS solutions. In this section, we provide you with information about some of the most widely used IaaS solutions available. We will give you details about providers such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines as the big players, and DigitalOcean as a viable solution. We will tackle OpenStack too, for those interested in what it could offer.

Amazon EC2

The IaaS solution provided by AWS is called Amazon EC2. It provides a good infrastructure solution for anyone, from low-cost compute instances to a high-power graphics processing unit (GPU) for machine learning. AWS was the first provider of IaaS solutions 12 years ago and it is doing better than ever, even after the COVID-19 pandemic (https://www.statista.com/chart/18819/worldwide-market-share-of...

Introducing PaaS solutions

PaaS is another form of cloud computing. Compared to IaaS, PaaS provides the hardware layer together with an application layer. The hardware and software are hosted by the CSP, with no need to manage them from the client side. Clients of PaaS solutions are, in the majority of cases, application developers. The CSPs that offer PaaS solutions are mostly the same as those that offer IaaS solutions. We have Amazon, Microsoft, and Google as the major PaaS providers. In the following subsections, we will discuss some PaaS solutions.

Amazon Elastic Beanstalk

Amazon offers the Elastic Beanstalk service, whose interface is straightforward. You can create a sample application or upload your own, and Beanstalk takes care of the rest, from deployment details to load balancing, scaling, and monitoring. You select the AWS EC2 hardware instances to deploy on.

Next, we will discuss another major player’s offering: Google App Engine.

Google App Engine

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Introducing CaaS solutions

CaaS is a subset of the IaaS cloud service model. It lets customers use individual containers, clusters, and applications on top of a provider-managed infrastructure. CaaS can be used either on-premises or in the cloud, depending on the customer’s needs. In a CaaS model, the container engines and orchestration are provided and managed by the CSP. A user’s interaction with containers can be done either through an API or a web interface. The container orchestration platform used by the provider—mainly Kubernetes and Docker—is important and is a key differentiator between different solutions.

We covered containers (and VMs) in Chapter 11, Working with Virtual Machines, and Chapter 12, Managing Containers with Docker, without giving any detailed information about orchestration or container-specialized micro operating systems. We will now provide you with some more details on those subjects.

Introducing the Kubernetes container...

Introducing DevOps

DevOps is a culture. Its name comes from a combination of development and operations, and it envisions the practices and tools that are used to deliver rapidly. DevOps is about speed, agility, and time. We all know the phrase “time is money,” and this applies very well to the IT sector. The ability to deliver services and applications at a high speed can make the difference between being successful as a business and being irrelevant in the market.

DevOps is a model of cooperation between different teams involved in delivering services and applications. This means that the entire life cycle, from development and testing, up to deployment and management, is done by teams that are equally involved at every stage. The DevOps model assumes that no team is operating in a closed environment, but rather operates transparently in order to achieve the agility they need to succeed. There is also a different DevOps model whereby security and quality assurance...

Exploring cloud management tools

Today’s software development and deployment relies on a plethora of physical systems and VMs. Managing all the related environments for development, testing, and production is a tedious task and involves the use of automated tools. The most widely used solutions for cloud infrastructure management are tools such as Ansible, Puppet, and Chef Infra. All these configuration management tools are powerful and reliable, and we will reserve Chapter 17, Infrastructure and Automation with Ansible, to teach you how to use only one of them: Ansible. Nevertheless, we will briefly introduce you to all of them in this section.

Ansible

Ansible is an open source project currently owned by Red Hat. It is considered a simple automation tool, used for diverse actions such as application deployment, configuration management, cloud provisioning, and service orchestration. It was developed in Python and uses the concept of nodes to define categories of systems...

Summary

In this chapter, we introduced you to cloud computing by showing you some of the most important concepts, tools, and solutions used. This should be enough for you to start learning about cloud technologies, which is a very vast and complex subject. For more details, please refer to the Further reading section.

We talked about cloud standards, a significant and largely overlooked subject, and about the main cloud types and services. You now have an idea of what each as-a-service solution means and what the main differences are between them. You know what the most important solutions are and how they are provided by the main players in this field: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. We introduced you to container orchestration with Kubernetes and how it works. You learned about APIs and minimal container-specialized operating systems and the DevOps culture, microservices, and infrastructure automation tools. You learned a lot in this chapter, but keep in mind that all these subjects...

Further reading

If you want to learn more about cloud technologies, please check out the following titles:

• OpenStack for Architects – Second Edition by Ben Silverman and Michael Solberg, Packt Publishing
• Learning DevOps – Second Edition by Mikael Krief, Packt Publishing
• Design Microservices Architecture with Patterns and Principles [Video] by Mehmet Ozkaya, Packt Publishing
• Multi-Cloud Strategy for Cloud Architects – Second Edition by Jeroen Mulder, Packt Publishing
• Architecting Cloud-Native Serverless Solutions, Safeer CM, Packt Publishing