Overview of Cloud Computing

Definition and Essential Characteristics of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing (NIST)

A model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

Examples of computing resources include:

• Networks
• Servers
• Applications
• Services

Cloud model

• 5 Essential characteristics
• 3 Deployment models
• 3 Service models

5 Essential characteristics

• Cloud Computing as a Service

  

3 Types of cloud deployment models

1. Public
2. Hybrid
3. Private

3 Service models

Three layers in a computing stack:

1. Infrastructure (IaaS)
2. Platform (PaaS)
3. Application (SaaS)

History and Evolution of Cloud Computing

In the 1950s:

• Large-scale mainframes with high-volume processing power.

• The practice of time-sharing, or resource pooling, evolved.

• Multiple users were able to access the same data storage layer and CPU power.

  In the 1970s:

• Virtual Machine (VM)

• Mainframes to have multiple virtual systems, or virtual machines, on a single physical node

Cloud: Switch from CapEx to OpEx

Key Considerations for Cloud Computing

Key Drivers for moving to cloud

Infrastructure and Workloads

• The cost of building and operating data centers can become astronomical.
• Low initial costs and pay-as-you-go attributes of cloud computing can add up to significant cost savings.

SaaS and development platforms

• Organizations need to consider if paying for application access is a more viable option than purchasing off-the-shelf software and subsequently investing in upgrades

Speed and Productivity

• Organizations also need to consider what it means to them to get a new application up and running in ‘x’ hours on the cloud versus a couple of weeks, even months on traditional platforms.
• Also, the person-hour cost efficiencies increases from using cloud dashboards, real-time statistics, and active analytics.

Risk Exposure

• Organizations need to consider the impact of making a wrong decision – their risk exposure.
• Is it safer for an organization to work on a 12-month plan to build, write, test, and release the code if they’re certain about adoption?
• And is it better for them to “try” something new paying-as-you-go rather than making long-term decisions based on little or no trial or adoption?

Benefits of cloud adoption

• Flexibility
• Efficiency
• Strategic Value

Challenges of cloud adoption

• Data security, associated with loss or unavailability of data causing business disruption
• Governance and sovereignty issues
• Legal, regulatory, and compliance issues
• Lack of standardization in how the constantly evolving technologies integrate and interoperate
• Choosing the right deployment and service models to serve specific needs
• Partnering with the right cloud service providers
• Concerns related to business continuity and disaster recovery

Key Cloud Service Providers and Their Services

Future of Cloud Computing

Cloud Service Providers

Alibaba Cloud

Amazon Web Services

Google Cloud Platform

IBM Cloud

Microsoft Azure

Oracle Cloud

Salesforce

SAP

Business Case for Cloud Computing

Cloud Adoption – No longer a choice

• It is no longer a thing of the future

• Single individual to Global multi-billion dollar enterprise, anybody can access the computing capacity they need on the cloud.

  Cloud makes it possible for businesses to:

• Experiment

• Fail

• Learn Faster than ever before with low risk.

• Businesses today have greater freedom to change course than to live with the consequences of expensive decisions taken in the past.

• To remain, competitive, businesses need to be able to respond quickly to marketplace changes.

• Product lifecycles have shortened, and barriers to entry have become lower.

• The power, scalability, flexibility, and pay-as-you-go economics of cloud has made it underpinning foundation for digital transformation.

Emerging Technologies Accelerated by Cloud

Internet of Things in the Cloud

Artificial Intelligence on the Cloud

AI, IoT, and the Cloud

BlockChain and Analytics in the Cloud

Blockchain & Cloud

A 3-Way Relationship

Analytics on the Cloud

How can analytics technology leverage the cloud?

• Track trends on social media to predict future events
• Analyze data to build machine learning models in cognitive applications
• Data analytics and predictions maintenance solutions for city infrastructure

Cloud Computing Models

Overview of Cloud Service Models

• IaaS
• PaaS
• SaaS

IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service

It is a form of cloud computing that delivers fundamentals:

• compute

• network

• storage to consumers on-demand, over the internet, on a pay-as-you-go basis.

  The cloud provider hosts the infrastructure components traditionally present in an on-premises data center, as well as the virtualization or hypervisor layer.

IaaS Cloud

The ability to track and monitor the performance and usage of their cloud services and manage disaster recovery.

• End users don’t interact directly with the physical infrastructure, but experience it as a service provided to them.

• Comes with supporting services like auto-scaling and load balancing that provide scalability and high performance.

• Object storage is the most common mode of storage in the cloud, given that it is highly distributed and resilient.

  

IaaS use cases

Test and Development

• Enable their teams to set up test and development environments faster.
• Helping developers focus more on business logic than infrastructure management.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

• Require a significant amount of technology and staff investment.
• Make applications and data accessible as usual during a disaster or outage.

Faster Deployments and Scaling

• To deploy their web applications faster.
• Scale infrastructure up and down as demand fluctuates.

High Performance Computing

• To solve complex problems involving millions of variables and calculations

Big Data Analysis

• Patterns, trends, and associations requires a huge amount of processing power.
• Provides the required high-performance computing, but also makes it economically viable.

IaaS Concerns

• Lack of transparency
• Dependency on a third party

PaaS – Platform as a Service

PaaS

A cloud computing model that provides a complete application platform to:

• Develop
• Deploy
• Run
• Manage

PaaS Providers Host and Manages

Installation, configuration, operation of application infrastructure:

• Servers

• Networks

• Storage

• Operating system

• Application runtimes

• APIs

• Middleware

• Databases

  User manages: Application Code

  

Essential Characteristics of PaaS

• High level of abstraction
  • Eliminate complexity of deploying applications
• Support services and APIs
  • Simplify the job of developers
• Run-time environments
  • Executes code according to application owner and cloud provider policies
• Rapid deployment mechanisms
  • Deploy, run, and scale applications efficiently
• Middleware capabilities
  • Support a range of application infrastructure capabilities

Use Cases of PaaS

• API development and management
• Internet of Things (IoT)
• Business analytics/intelligence
• Business Process Management (BPM)
• Master data management (MDM)

Advantages of PaaS

• Scalability
• Faster time to market
• Greater agility and innovation

PaaS available offerings

Risks of PaaS

• Information security threats
• Dependency on service provider’s infrastructure
• Customer lack control over changes in strategy, service offerings, or tools

SaaS – Software as a Service

A cloud offering that provides access to a service provider’s cloud-based software.

Provider maintains:

• Servers

• Databases

• Application Code

• Security

  Providers manages application:

• Security

• Availability

• Performance

SaaS Supports

• Email and Collaboration
• Customer Relationship Management
• Human Resource Management
• Financial Management

Key Characteristics

• Multi-tenant architecture
• Manage Privileges and Monitor Data
• Security, Compliance, Maintenance
• Customize Applications
• Subscription Model
• Scalable Resources

Key Benefits

• Greatly reduce the time from decision to value
• Increase workforce productivity and efficiency
  • Users can access core business apps from anywhere
  • Buy and deploy apps in minutes
• Spread out software costs over time

Use Cases for SaaS

Organizations are moving to SaaS to:

• Reduce on-premise IT infrastructure and capital expenditure

• Avoid ongoing upgrades, maintenance, and patching

• Run applications with minimal input

• Manage websites, marketing, sales, and operations

• Gain resilience and business continuity of the cloud provider

  Trending towards SaaS integration platforms.

SaaS Concerns

• Data ownership and data safety
• Third-party maintains business-critical data
• Needs good internet connection

Deployment Models

Public Cloud

Public Cloud providers in the market today

Public cloud characteristics

Public cloud benefits

Public cloud concerns

Public cloud use cases

• Building and testing applications, and reducing time-to-market for their products and services.
• Businesses with fluctuating capacity and resourcing needs.
• Build secondary infrastructures for disaster recovery, data protection, and business continuity.
• Cloud storage and data management services for greater accessibility, easy distribution, and backing up their data.
• IT departments are outsourcing the management of less critical and standardized business platforms and applications to public cloud providers.

Private Cloud

“Cloud infrastructure provisioned for exclusive use by a single organization comprising multiple consumers, such as the business units within the organization. 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.”

Internal or External

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

An external cloud that offers a private, secure, computing environment in a shared public cloud.

Best of Both Worlds

Benefits of Private Clouds

Common Use Cases

Hybrid Cloud

Connects an organization on-premise private cloud and third-party public cloud.

It gives them:

• Flexibility

• Workloads move freely

• Choice of security and regulation features

  With proper integration and orchestration between the public and private clouds, you can leverage both clouds for the same workload. For example, you can leverage additional public cloud capacity to accommodate a spike in demand for a private cloud application also known as “cloud bursting”.

The Three Tenets

Types of Hybrid Clouds

Benefits

• Security and compliance
• Scalability and resilience
• Resource optimization
• Cost-saving
• A hybrid cloud lets organizations deploy highly regulated or sensitive workloads in a private cloud while running the less-sensitive workloads on a public cloud.
• Using a hybrid cloud, you can scale up quickly, inexpensively, and even automatically using the public cloud infrastructure, all without impacting the other workloads running on your private cloud.
• Because you’re not locked-in with a specific vendor and also don’t have to make either-or- decisions between the different cloud models, you can make the most cost-efficient use of your infrastructure budget. You can maintain workloads where they are most efficient, spin-up environments using pay-as-you-go in the public cloud, and rapidly adopt new tools as you need them.

Hybrid Cloud Use Cases

• SaaS integration
• Data and AI integration
• Enhancing legacy apps
• VMware migration

Components of Cloud Computing

Overview of Cloud Infrastructure

After choosing the cloud service model and the cloud type offered by vendors, customers need to plan the infrastructure architecture. The infrastructure layer is the foundation of the cloud.

Region

It is a geographic area or location where a cloud provider’s infrastructure is clustered, and may have names like NA South or US East.

Availability Zones

• Multiple Availability Zones (AZ)

• Have their own power, cooling, networking resources

• Isolation of zones improves the cloud’s fault tolerance, decrease latency, and more

• very high bandwidth connectivity with other AZs, Data Centers and the internet

  

Computing Resources

Cloud providers offer several compute options:

• Virtual Servers (VMs)
• Bare Metal Servers
• Serverless (Abstraction)

Storage

Virtual servers come with their default local storage, but the stored documents are lost as we destroy the servers. Other more persistent options are:

• Traditional Data Centers:
  • Block Storage
  • File Storage
• Often struggle with scale, performance and distributed characteristics of cloud.
• The most common mode of storage
  • Object Storage
• It is highly distributed and resilient

Networking

Networking infrastructure in a cloud datacenter include traditional networking hardware like:

• routers

• switches

  For users of the Cloud, the Cloud providers have Software Defined Networking (SDN), which allows for easier networking:

• provisioning

• configuration

• management

  

  Networking interfaces in the cloud need:

• IP address

• Subnets

  It is even more important to configure which network traffic and users can access your resources:

• Security Groups

• ACLs

• VLANs

• VPCs

• VPNs

  Some traditional hardware appliances:

• firewalls

• load balancers

• gateways

• traffic analyzers

  Another networking capability provided by the Cloud Providers is:

• CDNs

Types of Virtual Machines

Shared or Public Cloud VMs

Transient or Spot VMs

• The Cloud provider can choose to de-provision them at any time and reclaim the resources

  These VMs are great for:

• Non-production

• Testing and developing applications

• Running stateless workloads, testing scalability

• Running big data and HPC workloads at a low cost

  

Reserved virtual server instances

• Reserve capacity and guarantee resources for future deployments

• If you exceed your reserved capacity, complement it with hourly or monthly VMs Note: Not all predefined VMs families or configuration may be available as reserved.

  

Dedicated Hosts

• Single tenant isolation
• Specify the data center and pod
• This allows for maximum control over workload placement
• Used for meeting compliance and regulatory requirements or licensing terms

Bare Metal Servers

A bare metal server is a single-tenant, dedicated physical server. In other words, it’s dedicated to a single customer.

• Cloud Provider manages the server up to the OS.
• The Customer is responsible for administering and managing everything else on the server.

Bare Metal Server Configuration

• Preconfigured by the cloud provider
• Custom-configured as per customer specifications

  • Processors

  • RAM

  • Hard drives

  • Specialized components

  • The OS

    Add GPUs:

• Accelerating scientific computation
• Data analytics
• Rendering professional grade virtualized graphics

Characteristics

• Can take longer to provision
• Minutes to hours
• More expensive than VMs
• Only offered by some cloud providers

Workloads

• Fully customizable/ demanding environments

• Dedicated or long-term usage

• High Performance Computing

• Highly secure / isolated environments

  

Bare-metal server vs. Virtual Servers

Secure Networking in Cloud

Networking in Cloud vs. On Premise

To create a network in cloud:

• Define the size of the Network using IP address range, e.g.,: 10.10.0.0/16

  

Direct Connectivity

Building a Cloud

It entails creating a set of logical constructs that deliver networking functionality akin to data center networks for securing environments and ensuring high performing business applications.

Containers

Containers are an executable unit of software in which application code is packaged, along with its libraries and dependencies, in common ways so that it can be run anywhere—desktops, traditional IT, or the cloud. Containers are lighter weight and consume fewer resources than Virtual Machines.

• Containers streamline development and deployment of cloud native applications
• Fast
• Portable
• Secure

Cloud Storage and Content Delivery Networks

Basics of Storage on the Cloud

• Direct Attached/Local Storage

  • Within the same server or rack
  • Fast
  • Use for OS
  • Not suitable
    • Ephemeral (Temporary)
    • Not shared
    • Non-resilient

• File Storage

  • Disadvantages
    • Slower
  • Advantages

    • Low cost

    • Attach to multiple servers

      

• Block Storage

  • Advantages

    • Faster read/write speeds

      

• Object Storage

• Disadvantages

  • Slowest speed

• Advantages

  • Least expensive

  • Infinite in size

  • Pay for what you use

    

File Storage

Like Direct attached:

• Attached to a compute node to store data

  Unlike Direct attached:

• Less expensive

• More resilient to failure

• Less disk management and maintenance for user

• Provision much larger amounts of Storage

  File storage is mounted from remote storage appliances:

• Resilient to failure

• Offer Encryption

• Managed by service provider

  File storage is mounted on compute nodes via Ethernet networks:

Multiple Compute Nodes

• File storage can be mounted onto more than one compute node
• Common Workloads:

  • Departmental file share

  • ‘Landing zone’ for incoming files

  • Repository of files

    i.e., speed variance is not an issue

• Low cost database storage

IOPS

Input/Output Operations Per Second – the speed at which disks can write and read data.

• Higher IOPS value = faster speed of underlying disk
• Higher IOPS = higher costs
• Low IOPS value can become a bottleneck

Block Storage

What is Block Storage?

Block storage breaks files into chunks (or block) of data.

• Stores each block separately under a unique address.

• Must be attached to a compute node before it can be utilized.

  Advantages:

• Mounted from remote storage appliances

• Extremely resilient to failure

• Data is more secure

  Mounted as a volume to compute nodes using a dedicated network of optical fibers:

• Signals move at the speed of light

• Higher price-point

• Perfect for workloads that need low-latency

• Consistent high speed

• Databases and mail servers

• Not suitable for shared storage between multiple servers

IOPS

For block storage, as it is for file storage, you need to take the IOPS capacity of the storage into account:

• Specify IOPS characteristics
• Adjust the IOPS as needed
• Depending on requirements and usage behavior

Common Attributes of File and Block Storage

• Block and File Storage is taken from appliances which are maintained by the service provider
• Both are highly available and resilient
• Often include data encryption at rest and in transit

Differences: File Storage vs. Block Storage

Remember: Consider workload IOPS requirements for both storage types.

Object Storage

1. Object storage can be used without connecting to a particular compute node to use it:

2. Object storage is less expensive than other cloud storage options
3. The most important thing to note about Object Storage is that it’s effectively infinite - With Object Storage, you just consume the storage you need and pay per gigabyte cost for what you use.

When to use Object Storage:

• Good for large amounts of unstructured data
• Data is not stored in any kind of hierarchical folder or directory structure

Object Storage Buckets

Managed by Service Provider

Object Storage – Resilience Options

Object Storage – Use Cases

• Any Data which is static and where fast read and write speeds are not necessary

  • Text files

  • Audio files

  • Video files

  • IoT Data

  • VM images

  • Backup files

  • Data Archives

    Not suitable for operating systems, databases, changing content.

Object Storage – Tiers and APIs

Object Storage Tiers

Standard Tier

• Store objects that are frequently accessed
• Highest per gigabyte cost

Vault/Archive Tier

• Store objects that are accessed once or twice a month
• Low storage cost

Cold Vault Tier

• Store data that is typically accessed once or twice a year
• Costs just a fraction of a US cent per/GB/month

Automatic archiving rules

• Automatic archiving rules for your data
• Automatically be moved to a cheaper storage tier if object isn’t accessed for long

Object Storage – Speed

• Doesn’t come with IOPS options
• Slower than file or block storage
• Data in ‘cold vault’ buckets, can take hours for retrieval
• Object storage not suitable for fast access to files.

Object Storage – Costs

• Object Storage is priced per/GB

• Other costs related to retrieval of the data e.g., Higher access costs for cold vault tiers

  Ensure data is stored in correct tier based on frequency of access.

Application Programming Interface, or API

Object Storage – Backup solutions

• Effective solution for Backup and Disaster Recovery
• Replacement for offsite backups
• Many backup solutions come with built-in options for Object Storage on Cloud
• More efficient than tape backups for geographic redundancy

CDN – Content Delivery Network

• Accelerates content delivery to users of the websites, by caching the content in data centers near their locations.
• Makes websites faster.
• Reduction in load on servers
• Increase uptime
• Security through obscurity

Hybrid Multi-Cloud, Microservices, and Serverless

Hybrid Multi-cloud

A computing environment that connects an organization’s on-premise private cloud and third-party public cloud into a single infrastructure for running the organization’s applications.

Hybrid Multicloud use cases

• Cloud scaling
• Composite cloud
• Modernization
• Data and AI
• Prevent lock-in to a particular cloud vendor and having a flexibility to move to a new provider of choice

Microservices

Microservices architecture:

• Single application
• coupled and independently deployable smaller components or services
  • These services typically have their own stack running on their own containers.
• They communicate with one another over a combination of:
  • APIs
  • Even streaming
  • Message brokers

What this means for businesses is:

• Multiple developers working independently
• Different stacks and runtime environments
• Independent scaling

Serverless Computing

Offloads responsibility for common infrastructure management tasks such as:

• Scaling
• Scheduling
• Patching
• Provisioning

Key attributes

Attributes that distinguish serverless computing from other compute models:

• No provisioning of servers and runtimes
• Runs code on-demand, scaling as needed
• Pay only when invoked and used i.e., not when underlying computer resources are idle.

Serverless

• Abstracts the infrastructure away from developers
• Code executed as individual functions
• No prior execution context is required

A Scenario

Serverless computing services

• IBM Cloud Functions
• AWS Lambda
• Microsoft Azure Functions

Determining Fit with Serverless

• Evaluate application characteristics

• Ensure that the application is aligned to serverless architecture patterns

  Applications that qualify for a serverless architecture include:

• Short-running stateless functions

• Seasonal workloads

• Production volumetric data

• Event-based processing

• Stateless microservices

Use Cases

Serverless architecture are well-suited for use cases around:

• Data and event processing

• IoT

• Microservices

• Mobile backends

  Serverless is well-suited to working with:

• Text

• Audio

• Image

• Video

  Tasks:

• Data enrichment

• Transformation

• Validation and cleansing

• PDF processing

• Audio normalization

• Thumbnail generation

• Video transcoding

• Data search and processing

• Genome processing

  Data Streams:

• Business

• IoT sensor data

• Log data

• Financial market data

Challenges

Vendor Dependent Capabilities

• Authentication

• Scaling

• Monitoring

• Configuration management

  

Cloud Native Applications, DevOps, and Application Modernization

Cloud Native Applications

• Developed to work only in the cloud environment
• Refactored and reconfigured with cloud native principles

Development Principles

Whether creating a new cloud native application or modernizing an existing application:

• Microservices Architecture
• Rely on Containers
• Adopt Agile Methods

Benefits

• Innovation
• Agility
• Commoditization

DevOps on the Cloud

What is DevOps?

Dev Teams:

• Design Software

• Develop Software

• Deliver Software

• Run Software

  Ops Teams

• Monitoring

• Predicting Failure

• Managing Environment

• Fixing Issues

  A collaborative approach that allows multiple stakeholders to collaborate:

• Business owners

• Development

• Operations

• Quality assurance

The DevOps Approach

It applies agile and lean thinking principles to all stakeholders in an organization who develop, operate, or benefit from the business’s software systems, including customers, suppliers, partners. By extending lean principles across the software supply chain, DevOps capabilities improve productivity through accelerated customer feedback cycles, unified measurements and collaboration across an enterprise, and reduced overhead, duplication, and rework.

Using the DevOps approach:

• Developers can produce software in short iterations
• A continuous delivery schedule of new features and bug fixes in rapid cycles
• Businesses can seize market opportunities
• Accelerated customer feedback into products

DevOps Process

• Continuous Delivery

• Continuous Integration

• Continuous Deployment

• Continuous Monitoring

• Delivery Pipeline

  

DevOps and Cloud

With its near limitless compute power and available data and application services, cloud computing platforms come with their own risks and challenges, which can be overcome by DevOps:

• Tools

• Practices

• Processes

  DevOps provides the following solutions to cloud’s complexities:

• Automated provisioning and installation

• Continuous integration and deployment pipelines

• Define how people work together and collaborate

• Test in low-cost, production-like environments

• Recover from disasters by rebuilding systems quickly and reliably

Application Modernization

Enterprise Applications

Application Modernization

Architecture: Monoliths > SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) > Microservices

Infrastructure: Physical servers > VM > Cloud

Delivery: Waterfall > Agile > DevOps

Cloud Security, Monitoring, Case Studies, Jobs

What is Cloud Security

The security in context of cloud is a shared responsibility of:

• User

• Cloud Provider

• Protect data

• Manage access

  SEC DevOps

• Secure Design

  • Secure Build
    • Manage Security

Identity and Access Management

Biggest cloud security concerns are:

• Data Loss and Leakage

• Unauthorized Access

• Insecure Interfaces and APIs

  Identity and Access Management are:

• First line of defense

• Authenticate and authorize users

• Provide user-specific access

Main types of users

A comprehensive security strategy needs to encompass the security needs of a wide audience:

• Organizational users

• Internet and social-based users

• Third-party business partner organizations

• Vendors

  There are three main type of users:

• Administrative users

• Developer users

• Application users

Administrative Users

Administrators | Operators | Mangers roles that typically create, update, and delete application and instances, and also need insight into their team members’ activities.

An attacker with administrative access could:

• Steal data from databases
• Deploy malicious applications
• Deface or destroy existing applications

Developer Users

Application developers | Platform developers | Application publishers

Can:

• Read sensitive information
• Create applications
• Update applications
• Delete applications

Application Users

Users of the cloud-hosted applications

Authentication and User Identity

Multifactor authentication

It is used to combat identity theft by adding another level of authentication for application users.

Cloud Directory Services

They are used to securely manage user profiles and their associated credentials and password policy inside a cloud environment.

• Applications hosted on the cloud do not need to use their own user repository

Reporting

It helps provide a user-centric view of access to resources or a resource-centric view of access by users:

• which users can access which resources

• changes in user access rights

• access methods used by each user

  

Audit and Compliance

Critical service within identity and access management framework, both for cloud provider, and cloud consumer.

User and service access management

It enables cloud application/service owners to provision and de-provision:

Streamline access control based on:

• Role
• Organization
• Access policies

Mitigating Risks

Some of the controls that can help secure these sensitive accounts include:

• Provisioning users by specifying roles on resources for each user
• Password policies that control the usage of special characters, minimum password lengths, and other similar settings
• Multifactor authentication like time-based one-time passwords
• Immediate provisioning of access when users leave or change roles

Access Groups

A group of users and service IDs created so that the same access can be assigned to all entities within the group with one or more access policies.

Access Policies

Access policies define how users, service IDs, and access groups in the account are given permission to access account resources.

Access Group Benefits

• Streamline access assignment process vs. assigning individual user access

• Reduce number of policies

  

Cloud Encryption

Encryption

It plays a key role on cloud, and is often referred to as the last line of defense, in a layered security model.

• Encrypts Data
• Data Access Control
• Key management
• Certificate management

Definition

Scrambling data in a way that makes it illegible.

Encryption Algorithm: Defines rules by which data will be transformed

Decryption Key: Defines how encrypted data will be transformed back to legible data.

It makes sure:

• Only authorized users have access to sensitive data.
• When accessed without authorization, data is unreadable and meaningless.

Cloud Encryption Services

• Can be limited to encryption of data that is identified as sensitive, or
• end-to-end encryption of all data uploaded to the cloud

Data Protection States

Encryption at Rest:

• Protects stored data
• Multiple encryption options:

  • Block and file storage

  • Built-in for object storage

  • Database encryption

    Encryption in Transit:

• Protects data while transmitting
• Includes encrypting before transmission
• Authenticates endpoints
• Decrypts data on arrival

  • Secure Socket Layer (SSL)

  • Transport Layer Security (TSL)

    Encryption in Use:

• Protects data in use in memory
• Allows computations to be performed on encrypted text without decryption

Client or Server-side Encryption

Cloud storage encryption could be server-side or client-side.

Server-side:

• Create and manage your own encryption keys, or

• Generate and manage keys on cloud

  Client-side:

• Occurs before data is sent to cloud

• Cloud providers cannot decrypt hosted data

  There is a need to implement a singular data protection strategy across an enterprise’s on-premise, hybrid, and multi-cloud deployments.

Multi-Cloud Data Encryption

Features:

• Data access management

• Integrated key management

• Sophisticated encryption

  Multi-cloud encryption console:

• Define and manage access policies

• Create, rotate, and manage keys

• Aggregate access logs

Key Management

Encryption doesn’t eliminate security risk.

• It separates the security risk from the data itself.
• Keys need to be managed and protected against threats.

Key Management Services

They enable customers to:

• Encrypt sensitive data at rest
• Easily create and manage the entire lifecycle of cryptographic keys
• Protect data from cloud service providers

Key Management Best Practices

• Storing encryption keys separately from the encrypted data
• Taking key backups offsite and auditing them regularly
• Refreshing the keys periodically
• Implementing multifactor authentication for both the master and recovery keys

Cloud Monitoring Basics and Benefits

Cloud Monitoring Solutions

Monitoring performance across an entire stack of applications and services can be time-consuming and draining on internal resources.

Cloud Monitoring Assessment

Cloud Monitoring Features

Cloud monitoring includes:

• Strategies

• Practices

• Processes

  Used for:

• Analyzing

• Tracking

• Managing services and apps

  It also serves to provide actionable insights that can help improve availability and user experience.

Cloud Monitoring Helps to:

• Accelerate the diagnosis and resolution of performance incidents
• Control the cost of your monitoring infrastructure
• Mitigate the impact of abnormal situations with proactive notifications
• Get critical Kubernetes and container insights for dynamic microservice monitoring
• Troubleshoot your applications and infrastructure

Cloud Monitoring Solutions Provide:

• Data in real-time with round the clock monitoring of VMs, services, databases, apps
• Multilayer visibility into application, user, and file access behavior across all apps
• Advanced reporting and auditing capabilities for ensuring regulatory standards
• Large-scale performance monitoring integrations across multicloud and hybrid cloud

Cloud Monitoring Categories

Infrastructure

• Help identify minor and large-scale failures

  • So that developers can take corrective action

  Database

• Help track processes, queries, and availability of services

  • To ensure accuracy and reliability

    Application Performance and Monitoring

• Help improve user experience

• Meet app and user SLAs

  • Minimize downtime and lower operational costs

Cloud Monitoring Best Practices

To get the most benefit from your cloud-based deployments, you can follow some standard cloud monitoring best practices.

1. Leverage end-user experience monitoring solutions
2. Move all aspects of infrastructure under one monitoring platform
3. Use monitoring tools that help track usage and cost
4. Increase cloud monitoring automation
5. Simulate outages and breach scenarios

Cloud monitoring needs to be a priority for organizations looking to leverage the benefits of cloud technologies.

Case Studies and Jobs

Case Studies in Different Industry Verticals

• The Weather Company migrating to the cloud to reliably deliver critical weather data at high speed, especially during major weather events such as hurricanes and tornadoes
• American Airlines, using the cloud platform and technologies to deliver digital self-service tools and customer value more rapidly across its enterprise
• Cementos Pacasmayo, achieving operational excellence and insight to help drive strategic transformation and reach new markets using cloud services
• Welch choosing cloud storage to drive business value from hybrid cloud
• Liquid Power using cloud-based SAP applications to fuel business growth

Career Opportunities and Job Roles in Cloud Computing

• Cloud Developers

  

• Cloud Integration Specialists

  

• Cloud Data Engineer

  

• Cloud Security Engineers

  

• Cloud DevOps Engineers

  

• Cloud Solutions Architects