Cloud computing has taken the software industry by storm, and for good reason. Deploying applications in the cloud enables you to deploy only the services you need for your infrastructure, dynamically scale to meet the demands of your users without incurring extra cost, all without requiring you to maintain and manage your own servers or datacenter. Read about ways that cloud computing can be used here.
How it Works
If you choose to deploy in the cloud, your cloud provider will have data centers set up all around the world. You can distribute your services among various regions in order to maintain high availability, but the cloud is more than just a collection of data centers. Cloud providers offer many services that can be utilized together. The infrastructure of a cloud-based application is centered on storage, compute and networking.
Compute
The compute layer generally focuses on virtual machines. Cloud-hosted virtual machines are essentially virtual computers hosted in the cloud provider’s data center, which can execute tasks that you assign to them. Generally, you can choose among Microsoft Windows, various flavors of Linux, and potentially other operating systems. Virtual machines used to execute application code are usually scalable, which means that the cloud provider will create more or less instances of that virtual machine as needed for the application.
Storage
The storage layer stores and backs up data used by your application. This can be in the form of block storage or volumes. Databases and file services run on this storage so that the application can access this data easily and efficiently. Just like compute, cloud storage solutions offer the ability to scale as needed when your application grows or demand from users increases.
Networking
Cloud-based networking solutions are needed to link together all the cloud services, as well as to expose your publicly facing application to the internet at large. Cloud services, including compute and storage, must be able to communicate with one another. Special networking configurations can also be done in order to integrate non-cloud hosted elements with your cloud-computing stack. This is a good way to migrate from an on-premises solution to a cloud solution without having to make all the changes at once.
Deployment Types
Public cloud is accessible through the internet. Deploying on the public cloud allows the solution to be easily accessible, but also comes with security risks and should not be used if sensitive information is collected. A private cloud is accessible only to you and other people who you explicitly allow to access it. This is essentially a private network of cloud-hosted services and can store secure data. The most common deployment is a hybrid cloud, which is a combination of the two. Publicly accessible content is hosted in the public cloud while the private cloud handles any sensitive data. Learn more about this here.
Conclusion
Cloud computing offers many benefits including automatically scaling services, availability to access data from anywhere, and more. If you are interested in learning more, consider completing Microsoft Azure administration training or a similar program in order to gain a deeper understanding of how cloud computing works and how it can benefit you or your company.