Hello everyone, I am back to fill you in on Cloud Computing, well not just cloud computing but two of the three offerings as defined by NIST.
The two Cloud Computing offerings I refer to are PaaS and IaaS. The third offering is SaaS which will be covered in another blog post by an extremely smart co-committee member. It will be a good read, so do not miss it.
Origin and definition
First, let’s look at where cloud computing term came from. By consensus the term dates back to 1996 in an office park outside Houston Texas. Netscape Web Browser (remember Netscape?), the Yankees were playing Atlanta in the World Series. Believe it or not a few Compaq Computer technology executives were planning the future of the Internet business and in the plan called it “Cloud Computing” Holy cow who knew!
I believe Compaq made a few dollars selling hardware to Internet Service providers. Good plan!
Before we delve into PaaS and IaaS we need to understand how they evolved or how it is defined.
The definition of Cloud Computing comes from NIS TSP 800-145 The NIST definition of Cloud Computing (September 2011).
Basically it is defined as “a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.
These services should have the ability to provide:
- on-demand self-service,
- easy access, (network)
- scalable for peak demand of resources,
- a measured service.(metered billing like a utility)
In this post we will focus on two of the three service offerings for Cloud Computing, Platform as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service. Together we will know what each has to offer and which one your organization may want or need.
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
One might think this is a hardware offering but it is a developer offering. It can be defined as a cloud computing platform that can give developers the ability to create web applications without having to buy or maintain the software infrastructure.
It differs from Saas because Saas delivers the application and PaaS is the creation of the software or application over the web.
When is PaaS really needed, when the,
- application needs to be highly portable in terms of where it is hosted,
- application language is proprietary and may have an impact in the development process,
- proprietary language would hinder later moves to another provider,
- application performance requires customized hardware and software.
What I take from this is when there is a need for quick developer resources this is the service you are looking for, quick to develop and quick to deliver, pretty much every organizations preferred method.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
This is my ball of wax so to speak. I am a hardware guy by nature and have had some experience in this part of Cloud Computing and I must say I really like the offerings.
By definition IaaS is a way of delivering servers, storage, network and operating systems as an on-demand service. Pretty simple huh. I do not have to buy that hardware but also I do not have to have the data center space and all of the things associated with a data center, like cooling electrical services, space to install the hardware, all of which organizations cringe is “capital expenses or capex”.
What is really cool about this is virtualization has enabled us to create not just a private cloud computing platform, but with our installed virtual infrastructure we now can have a “hybrid cloud infrastructure”. This is what I love about IaaS. You can literally move virtual servers on the fly and even add resources that may have been an issue on your private cloud.
The characteristics of Iaas:
- Resources are distributed
- Allows for dynamic scaling
- Has a utility like pricing model
- Includes multiple users on a single piece of hardware
So if you need temporary hardware or have no capital to invest in hardware or you need something dirty and fast, Infrastructure as a Service is the way to go. There are some reasons not to go to an IaaS offering when compliance is an issue to offshore data and compute and believe it or not if you need extreme levels of performance, IaaS could be cost prohibitive and that meter is going to spin really fast and the dollars add up even faster.
Where I think it makes sense is Disaster Recovery. Allows you to migrate critical servers in a hybrid environment to get that RTO you are required to achieve.
These services are offered by a multitude of vendors like AWS, Azure, Rackspace, Oracle just to name a few. Each have good offerings some stronger than others, some are pricier than others as well, specifically if outside users will access the application or if you are doing intense database operations that require multiple processors, lots of memory and tons of storage. These offerings are typically charged by the hour and can add up fast.
Take a look at the hardware cost and the people to maintain and update, depreciation over 3 years and you may see a cheaper or equivalent cost model to just put that application or hardware in the cloud.
Until next time.
Links
What is Cloud Computing?
Beginner's Guide to the Cloud
NIST.SP.800-145 Definition of Cloud Computing and it core components
Sources
Rackspace®
Microsoft®
Amazon Web Services®