Understanding Traditional (Pre-Cloud Era) vs Cloud Computing & it's Fundamentals

Traditional Computing (Pre-Cloud Era)

Firstly, let's talk about the time when there was no concept of cloud computing and one had to rely on the traditional approaches, which involved owning, building, and maintaining physical infrastructure to run applications and store data.

Let's check out some of the problems that were faced before the existence of cloud computing in terms of maintenance, scaling, resource utilization, capital expense and data security -

1. Maintenance and Management - Organizations had to employ IT staff to manage and maintain the hardware and software infrastructure which includes tasks like software updates, patch management, hardware repairs etc.

2. Capital Expense - companies have to invest a significant amount of money in purchasing servers, networking equipment, software licenses etc. upfront, which incurs huge costs.

3. Resource Utilization - Organizations had to estimate their computing needs in advance, which often leads to either over-provisioning or under-provisioning of resources.

4. Data Security and Backup - It was the organization's responsibility to implement backup and disaster recovery solutions which requires significant expertise and investment in specialized equipment and software.

5. Limited Scaling - Earlier scaling resources was a very complex job and if the business experienced increased demand, the organization had to purchase additional hardware, set it up, and configure the necessary software, which is time time-consuming process.

Now, Let's see how these problems which were faced traditionally are solved via cloud computing and its offerings.

Introduction to Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing is a technology that allows users to access and use computing resources such as servers, storage, databases, networking, analytics etc. and more over the internet. A user or a company can rent computing resources from one of the cloud service providers (AWS is one of them), and instead of owning and maintaining physical hardware or servers can be quite challenging. Cloud computing offers several advantages, including scalability, flexibility, cost-efficiency, and the ability to access resources from anywhere over the internet.

Types of Cloud Computing

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - [AWS service - Amazon EC2]

1. Provide building blocks for cloud IT and networking, computers, data storage space etc.

2. Highest level of flexibility and customization while creating infrastructure.

3. Easy parallel with traditional on-premises IT (how can we migrate from traditional on-premise to cloud)

Platform as a Service (PaaS) - [AWS service- Elastic Beanstalk]

1. Removes the need for your organization to manage the underlying infrastructure.

2. Focus on the deployment and management of your applications.

Software as a Service (SaaS) - [AWS - Rekognition for ML, & others -Dropbox, Zoom]

1. Completed product that is run and managed by the service provider.

Characteristics of Cloud Computing

• On-demand self-service - The user can provision resources and use them without human intervention from the service provider (AWS).

• Broad network access - Resource available over the network, and can be accessed by diverse client platforms.

• Multi-Tenancy and Resource pooling -

  • Multiple customers can share the same infrastructure and applications with security and privacy.

  • Multiple customers are serviced from the same physical resources.

• Rapid Elasticity and Scalability -

  • Automatically and quickly acquire and dispose of resources when needed.

  • Quickly and easily scale based on the demand.

• Measured service -

  • Usage is measured, users pay correctly for what they have used.

Impact of cloud computing

• Flexibility - change resource type when needed.

• Cost-Effectiveness - pay-as-you-go pricing model (pay for what you consume).

• Scalability - accommodate larger loads by making hardware stronger (vertical scaling) or adding additional nodes (Horizontal scaling).

• Elasticity - the ability to scale out and scale in when needed.

• High Availability and fault tolerance - build across data centers (AZs).

• Agility - rapid, develop, test and launch software applications in quick time.

Deployment Models of the Cloud

There are 3 Deployment models in the cloud -

Private Cloud [HPE, Dell, Oracle etc.]-

1. Cloud services used by a single organization, are not exposed to the public, where companies set up private clouds in their own data centers or with a hosting provider.

2. Complete control.

3. Security for sensitive applications.

4. Meet specific business needs.

Public Cloud - [AWS, Azure, Google Cloud]

1. Cloud resources are owned and operated by 3rd party cloud service providers delivered over the internet.

2. There are many advantages of cloud computing, some of them are:

   • Trade capital expense (CAPEX) for operational expense (OPEX)

     • Pay on demand - don't own hardware

     • Reduced TCO and operational expense (OPEX)

   • Benefit from economies of scale -

     • Offers services at lower costs than traditional IT infrastructure. They can purchase and maintain large quantities of hardware, software and networking equipment, which reduces the cost per unit by which AWS prices are reduced as it becomes more efficient due to large scale.

   • Stop guessing capacity -

     • Scale based on actual measured usage

   • Increase speed and agility -

     • Stop spending money running and maintaining data centers -

   • Go global in minutes -

     • Quickly deploy new applications or services without the need to purchase and install new hardware, which can reduce the time it takes to bring new products or services to market.

     • Leverage the AWS global infrastructure.

Hybrid Cloud -

• Keep some servers on-premises and extend some capabilities to the cloud.

• Control over sensitive assets in your private infrastructure.

• Flexibility and cost-effectiveness of the public cloud.

Pricing model of the cloud

Cloud Computing (AWS) has 3 pricing fundamentals, following the pay-as-you-go pricing model -

• Compute - pay for what you use

• Storage - pay for data stored in the cloud

• Networking - pay for data transfer OUT of the cloud as data transfer IN is free

Conclusion

In this blog, we embraced a journey starting from traditional computing (pre-cloud era) and the challenges faced at that time to the transformative realm of cloud computing. We discussed cloud computing, its types, deployment models, impact and lastly pricing models.

Reference Links:

Traditional vs Cloud Computing -

https://www.hpe.com/in/en/what-is/on-premises-vs-cloud.html

Thank you so much for reading my blog! 😊 I hope you found it helpful and informative. If you did, please 👍 give it a like and 💌 subscribe to my newsletter for more of this type of content. 💌

I'm always looking for ways to improve my blog, so please feel free to leave me a comment or suggestion. 💬

Thanks again for your support!

Connect with me -

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachitmishra1997/

#aws #awscommunitybuilders #cloudcomputing #cloud