Everyone is talking about the Public Cloud. Gartner forecasts a 21.4% YoY growth to reach $186Bn in 2018, from $153Bn in 2017. As companies execute their digitalization strategy to move their workloads to the cloud, they expect to increase the speed and agility of their business. Companies want to free up cash flows, by moving from a CapEx world, where infrastructure is paid upfront and amortised over years, into an OpEx era, where you pay monthly for the infrastructure you use.
Although the Cloud Computing trend seems to have appeared out of the blue, it has been cooking in the background for decades. First, companies started to move to colocation facilies to benefit from the financial efficiency of renting physical space, rather than investing in data center real estate. Second, hardware virtualization companies such as VMware abstracted away the physical layer, which brought repeatable, isolated, portable environments. Third, Cloud providers such as AWS continued the trend by providing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in a pay-as-you-go model, offering managed infrastructure in regards to compute, networking and storage. Forth, and something that is happening right now, Cloud providers are releasing more Platform as a Service (PaaS), or Serverless offerings, where you focus on your business logic, and let the Cloud provider take care of scaling, patching and securing the underlying infrastructure.
Cloud computing has five fundamental attributes, according to the definition of cloud computing proposed by the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Computing resources are on-demand and self-service. Cloud-computing customers use a web interface and get the processing power, storage, and network they need, without requiring human intervention from the service provider.
Customers have a broad network access, where they can access any resource remotely from any location, removing the need of being colocated with your cloud resources.
The Cloud Provider has a pool of resources that serve multiple customers using a multi-tenant model. Those resources are distributed across multiple locations and datacenters, and customer applications as logically isolated from one another.
Resources offer rapid elasticity. The number of resources can grow or shrink on demand, and it appears for customers to be an infinite pool of them.
The Cloud is a measured service. In a use as you need bases, with no need to reserve capacity, customers can request resources at any time and only pay afterwards for what they use. If they stop using resources, they stop paying. If they need to scale up to adapt to peaks in load for a couple of hours, they can launch more resources and only pay when those resources are running.
Private cloud. The cloud infrastructure is provisioned for exclusive use by a single organization comprising multiple consumers (e.g., business units). It may be owned, managed, and operated by the organization, a third party, or some combination of them, and it may exist on or off premises.
Community cloud. The cloud infrastructure is provisioned for exclusive use by a specific community of consumers from organizations that have shared concerns (e.g., mission, security requirements, policy, and compliance considerations). It may be owned, managed, and operated by one or more of the organizations in the community, a third party, or some combination of them, and it may exist on or off premises.
Public cloud. The cloud infrastructure is provisioned for open use by the general public. It may be owned, managed, and operated by a business, academic, or government organization, or some combination of them. It exists on the premises of the cloud provider. The leaders in this market are AWS, Azure and GCP.
Hybrid cloud. The cloud infrastructure is a composition of two or more distinct cloud infrastructures (private, community, or public) that remain unique entities, but are bound together by standardized or proprietary technology that enables data and application portability (e.g., cloud bursting for load balancing between clouds).
We see companies also adopting multi-cloud strategies, where they don’t want to depend only on one public cloud provider, but will chose to deploy to multiple clouds. This reduces risk of lock-in, but adds costs and complexities.
Other companies are adopting hybrid models to save cost. For example, if your business is technology, you have massive computing needs, and you are looking to optimize costs, a vertical integration story might make sense, where you build your own private cloud to benefit from economies of scale with a big upfront CapEx investment. For example, Dropbox announced in 2017 their selective migration of some services out of AWS into their own private cloud. Two years later, we see some of the savings they achieved.
Also, have you heard about Google Actual Cloud Platform?
There are many possible configurations, let me know if you would like to share yours!