Clouds in IT. Part One.
Article about “Clouds in IT”. Part One.
I’ve decided to transfer my articles from Facebook to own blog. Just to have it close to my hands, and not to lose it.
In the last paragraph of the previous article about virtualization cloud computing was mentioned, because it is based on virtualization. I think that this concept should be disclosed in more detail.
Cloud. What is it and what is it eaten with?
Currently, the word “cloud” has become very fashionable, it is used everywhere – where necessary and where it is not necessary. And here and there you can hear about cloud computing, cloud storage, et cetera.However, as practice shows, many, including even specialists, confuse the clouds and virtual infrastructure.
Suppose you’ve purchased a server and installed a hypervisor, deployed some virtual machines on it, on which you installed certain services, for example, mail service or file storage. Is it a cloud? No.
In fact, the cloud is a special case of virtualization.
The fact is that the concept of “cloud computing” implies the lack of the need for a technical specialist to deploy virtual resources – that is, in fact, the user can do everything himself and immediately get the result – a virtual machine with installed operating system. It remains only to enter the login password pair and get it up and running.
The principles of self-service and instant installation (Instant Setup) – make the clouds an extremely convenient product for software development companies when it is urgent to deploy a platform for product testing, with predetermined characteristics such as the number of processors, RAM, disk space and network interfaces.
Many companies providing hosting services and VPS, VDS also actively use the clouds in their work. Previously, when ordering services, I had to enter into correspondence with the support service or sales department and indicate the necessary characteristics, now everything has come down to five clicks with the left mouse button. This kind of service is called IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)
Four clicks of which are the choice of the specified characteristics, and the fifth is the choice of the operating system.
After selection, a virtual machine is created, the creation time usually does not exceed 1-2 minutes.
How did you manage to achieve this, you can ask. The answer is simple – in fact, all these virtual machines have already been created. These are templates and as soon as you select the characteristics you need, the corresponding template is cloned and launched. While the virtual machine starts, a script is applied that applies the operating system settings, such as the computer name, as well as the IP address and network settings.
So, now we can summarize.
In this article, we examined what the difference between a virtual infrastructure and the cloud (in this context, cloud computing) actually lies. To service the virtual infrastructure and create virtual machines from scratch, you need a specialist who will create a virtual machine with the necessary characteristics, install the operating system and perform the initial setup. In the cloud, all this happens automatically, thanks to the templates. P.S. Although yes, in any case, someone also had to make templates, so now you can use results of someone’s work.
In a series of next articles, we will look at cloud storage, as well as the types of cloud services and services.
10/07/2016
Post in Russian – https://mykola.today/%d0%bf%d1%80%d0%be-%d0%be%d0%b1%d0%bb%d0%b0%d0%ba%d0%b0-%d1%87%d0%b0%d1%81%d1%82%d1%8c-%d0%bf%d0%b5%d1%80%d0%b2%d0%b0%d1%8f/