DEMISTIFYING THE CLOUD

A Cloud Computing Guide:

Now Small Business, Corporations, and Enterprises can discover how they
can use cloud computing services and hosting platforms to expand their
infrastructure without having to pay for unused resources, and at the same
time focus on their core competencies as opposed to dealing with the
headaches of server and hosting Infrastructure.

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Table Of Contents
1.

What is Cloud Computing?

a. History of Computing / Conventional Hosting
b. Evolution of Cloud Computing

2.

What are the Benefits Of Cloud Computing?

3.

The 3 Layers (Building Blocks) of Cloud Computing

4.

Which Platform is right for you?

5.

Making An Informed Decision

6.

Conclusion

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What is Cloud Computing?

Just in case you are not particularly technologically knowledgeable, then cloud
computing could quite possibly make you feeling confounded as well as despairing. The
expression is without question pretty ambiguous, and furthermore every time a thing is
referred to as a cloud, quite often it can be due to the fact no one knows the best way to
correctly define it. If you are browsing for the simple definition, relax. Right now there
are a good number of people to help you comprehend this term, you merely would need
to perform your investigation and look at a handful of different places for the most wellrounded material.
Cloud Computing is a service or platform that hosts a businesses applications on an
infrastructure (server hardware, datacenter infrastructure and/or network) or cloud.
Cloud Computing allows you to scale, expand, and retract your computing resources
needed to host your web applications, but only pay for what you use. This model
mimmicks the way you pay your electric bill. You pay for the electricity used based on
the meter readout.
With Cloud Computing, you also pay for the hosting, or computing resources that you
used, (Space, bandwidth, power) and you dont pay for an entire server, or server
infrasctructure, if you dont need it.
I think it is beneficial in explaining cloud computing at this point to talk about convential
hosting methods. Typically if you were to have your own business, and needed a
website (taking the analogy down to the smallest iteration on the hosting scale) you
would have looked for a webhosting company that would offer you shared hosting or in
laymans terms, a small slice of space and bandwidth on a larger server that was hosted
in a facility.
With that shared hosting many small companies could get by, even with the cons of not
having their own space. Shared hosting is you sharing space on a server with other
customers. Issues with security, high availability and resource utilization become a
worry because your sharing the space with someone else. Their website could surge in
traffic, causing downtime or issues for you and your business.
The next logical step was to get a dedicated server and have your own dedicated
space. That way noone elses site could affect yours as you would have your own gear
and resources on the server.
Another form of hosting is called colocation. Some companies have their own
infrastructure or hardware already and need to host it in a top tier facility, because
maybe they dont have the bandwidth carriers or the uptime, or power requirements
they need in their physcial location. Quite possibly it would cost them much more to
keep their gear at their own location, so they would co-locate their gear, or put it at a
datacenter facility, which had the space, power and bandwidth to accommodate their
growing business.

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This form of hosting requires typically that the company have their own in-house staff
that can manage the equipment, scaling, and other issues that companies commonly
face today.
As virtualization became a hot topic a few years ago, with the advent of virtualization
software companies like VMWare, XEN, Parallels, and others, companies were able to
take their own gear, and create computing environments on VIRTUAL server
environments that used less physical hardware and resources, because they were able
to split the physical server up into 2 or 3 servers or more, and reduce capital
expenditures.
This was and still is an obvious step in the right direction for companies wanting to save
money. Whether they colocated their own environment and virtualized their gear down
from 1000 servers, to 100 servers, lets say, with a product like VMWare or whether they
let the hosting company offer them virtualized environments, like a VPS (Virtual Private
Server) or VM (Virtual Machine) as opposed to renting a full server.
The only issue is you are still dealing with hardware, and thats where Cloud Computing
comes in. According to IBM, a cloud computing platform or application, dynamically
provisions, configures, reconfigures, and de-provisions servers as needed.
Forrester Research Group stated, Cloud Computing looks very much like the
instantiation of many vendors visions of the datacenter of the future; its an abstracted,
fabric-based infrasructure that enables dynamic move-ment, growth, and protection of
services that is billed like a utility.

Thus the phrase utility computing is heard so much of these days. Cloud computing
separates or divorces the issues of hardware and hosting infrastructure from the
customer. Customers dont have to purchase their own webservers, they pay for their
use of the providers servers or infrastructure as they use them.
This method of computing really does simplify things for the end user or hosting
customer and opens up the doors for smaller startups to be able to access the
resources of large hosting infrastructures, yet only pay for their usage.

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What Are The Benefits Of Cloud Computing?

Cloud Computing offers many benefits, however we will narrow it down to four different
aspects: the flexibility to scale upward or down due to its flexibility, automatic
provisioning or self-service provisioning, a pay as you go design together with billing as
well as metering, and APIs or application programming interfaces. All of this merged
flexibility help to make it an appealing alternative to small together with big corporations
equally.
Many consumers can easily incorporate as well as profit via cloud computing.
Regardless if you are the end consumer who knows nothing of the technology, the
operators inside the businesses who manage the info and service level or perhaps the
hosting company who does all of the servicing and IT, cloud computing is becoming
more and more mainstream each and every day.
One of the main benefits of cloud computing is the shear fact that it allows companies to
focus on their core competencies. Lets take a large Greeting card company for
instance. Their business is seasonal, and in certain months they use massive amounts
of computing power, while in others, they use much less. The company itself doesnt
have to worry about scaling, they are utilizing cloud computing, so they know it will be
there if they need it. In turn, they can focus on what they do best, greeting cards. Brings
more revenue, makes their customers happier, and in the end they can focus on their
bottom line.
One of the greatest benefits of cloud computing is the cost savings of paying for only
what you use. Also, institutions that historically would have huge expense by keeping all
their IT function In House, are seeing cost savings by significantly lowering capital
costs, maintenance costs, and IT personnel costs.
Generally cloud computing is difficult to understand, especially when you find out how
there are variations. Aside from community and exclusive clouds, yet youll find hybrid
clouds. Hybrid clouds are generally a mixture of both private and public, plus there may
be different versions of all of them.
Whether you are a small or large corporation, you will in some form or fashion end up
utilizing cloud computing technology. Several larger corporations such as Amazon not
to mention Google have got the vast majority of their own IT resources within the cloud.
Regardless your volume, it will save you on cost, potential, space plus time. These
solutions combined with data virtualization allow businesses to be more efficient.
So for a simple bullet list of benefits to cloud computing they are:
1.

Lower Costs Cloud computing pools all of the computing resources that can
be distributed to applications as needed optimizing the use of the sum of the

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computing resources and delivering better efficiency and utilization of the entire
shared infrastructure
2.

Cap-Ex Free Computing Whether you go with a public cloud or outsourced

private cloud computing option, cloud computing delivers a better cash flow by
elimiting capital expense associated with building the server infrastructure.

3.

Deploy Projects Faster Because servers can be brought up and destroyed in

a matter of minutes, the time to deploy a new application drops dramatically with
cloud computing. Rather than installing and networking a new hardware server,
the new server can be dialed up and imaged in through a self-serve control
console. Or better yet, with a private cloud, your service provider can dial up a
new server with a single call or support ticket.

4.

Scale As Needed As your applications grow, you can add storage, RAM and
CPU capacity as needed. This means you can buy just enough and scale as
the application demands grow.

5.

Lower Maintenance Costs driven by 2 factors: Less hardware and outsourced

shared IT staff. Since cloud computing uses less physical resources, there is less
hardware to power and maintain. With an outsourced cloud, you dont need to
keep server, storage, network and virtualization experts on staff full time. You get
the economy of scale of those experts through your cloud provider.

6.

Resiliency and Redundancy One of the benefits of a private cloud

deployment is that you can get automatic failver between hardware platforms and
disaster recover services to bring up your server set in a separate data center
should your primary data center experience an outage.

7.

Rapid Staging Environments For Development - The final benefit is probably

best suited for development firms, but the cloud computing environment gives a
company the ability to have changed-based management between development
and production environments quickly and easily. As a matter of fact there is no
waste. For instance, a development company creates a development
environment for a project . As soon as the client signs off, and says lets go live,
they can take a snapshot, and rename it as the production environment, and
simply turn off the development environment until they need it again.

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Cloud Computing Layers

There are three layers or building blocks to cloud computing. Companies use them
differently based on their needs and requirements. These layers are, SAAS (Software
As A Service, PAAS (Platform As A Service), and IAAS (Infrastructure As A Service).
All of these allow users to run applications and store data online. However each offers a
different level of flexibility and user control. The differences are explained below.
1. SAAS (Software A Service): Allows users to run existing online applications. An
example would be Salesforce.com, one of the most popular Sales and CRM
systems used by many corporations.
2. PAAS (Platform As A Service): Allows users create their own applications using
supplier specific tools and languages (platforms). A good example of this would
be Applogic by 3Tera. (3tera.com)
3. IAAS (Infrastructure As A Service): Allows users to run any applications they
please on cloud hardware of their choice. This is where most cloud hosting
providers live. An Example would be Instance.com. An environment where you
can create your own instances practically as small or as large as you want and
host whatever you want on them.
Lets discuss these layers of cloud computing in a bit more detail. SAAS is the easiest
way to cloud compute, and is where off the shelf applications are accessed over the
internet. For example, Google Microsoft and Zoho each offer an online word processor,
spreadsheet, and presentation software. There are also some great business
applications such as ADP, Netsuite, and Salesforce.
The Advantages of SAAS are:
1. Free or Paid Subscription to the software or service.
2. Can Be Accessed From Any Computer or Device (Smart Phone or PDA)
3. Facilitates Collaborative working (Users dont have to email back and forth, or
worry about having out-dated copies of group shared documents any longer)
With those advantages there are also limitations. In business there are requirements for
applications that simply cannot be met with generic applications you can find online.
The next stepping stool is PAAS, an Platform in which you can create custom
applications for your business and your companies needs. Microsofts Azure offers a
Platform for developers to create windows applications that they can use and host
online.

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The Advantages Of PAAS are:

1. Rapid development at low cost
2. Private or Public environment/deployment.
The Disadvantage is that it limits developers to the programs/tools and languages that
the PAAS provider offers.
There is also the risk of vendor Lock In as applications made on one PAAS provider
platform may not be able to be moved to another easily or at all.
IAAS, or Infrastructure as a service allows a business to run whatever applications they
would like on a providers cloud hardware. This means that existing applications can be
migrated from a company datacenter to a Cloud (IAAS) provider datacenter to reduce IT
costs.
The fundamental unit of cloud infrastructure is the server. As mentioned previously,
servers can be either physical or virtual. Physical servers are individual computers,
whereas virtual servers are software based slices of a physical server, shared amongst
many users by a process called virtualization.

Depending on the types of servers involved, IAAS comes in four different categories.
1) Private cloud - The most secure and costly, where a certain number of physical
servers are dedicated to one customer.
2) Dedicated Servers - A customer rents physical servers on-demand where the cost is
always matching the amount of servers being used.
3) Hybrid Hosting - There is a mix of physical dedicated servers and cloud instances to
meet the flexible demand of a customers requirements and reduce cost.
4) Cloud Computing - Where a customer rents virtual server instances on demand and
billed on an hourly basis.

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Which Platform is right for you?

So now that we have differentiated the different types of cloud computing platforms, you
might be asking yourself which one is right for you. It may be that a hybrid solution is
right.
To determine this an assessment of what exactly you are trying to accomplish and what
type of environment you currently have is necessary.
SAAS environments typically handle one task or a few tasks, and arent usually a full
solution. i.e. you may be able to handle your payroll, and sales funnel processes with
Salesforce and ADP, but what about your business specific applications like products
and or services that you may offer, either digital or physical. Those products and
services typically if they are custom designed may either need to be on a PAAS or
IAAS.
Most companies can typically go with an IAAS (Cloud Hosting Provider) if they already
have their own development tools and environments in place. If they are newer, or
startups, they may want to use a PAAS and have their developers use a Platform and
tools strictly on the cloud.
In many situations using a hybrid, which may include all 4 types of hosted cloud
infrastructure and all 3 types of Cloud Layers, is the case.
Typically, talking with a hosting provider may be exactly what you need to do, to
determine the best environment for your dev and production environments.
There are several providers out there and we have gone through and tested most of
them. In our opinion if you are looking at moving into the cloud or getting started with
cloud hosting, you might want to check out the guys at instance.com.
Instance.com offers some unique features that make it very attractive. Other than very
affordable pricing at a mere $20 per month to get your own instance, you can create
snapshots of your environment on a scheduled basis. You have the ability to host
whatever applications, choosing between whatever operating system you like.
Couple that with the ability scale up and down, and a staff of people that are used to
offering top notch managed support from their history as a managed dedicated server
provider and you cant go wrong.
If you would like to look at them, mention CloudComputingGuide.net and receive a great
deal.

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Making An Informed Decision

If you are ready to start your journey into Cloud Computing, and join the droves of
companies who are already experienced the benefits of this new era of computing
technology, then we advice you to work with a consultant who can help you analyze
your environment and find out what plan and path will work for you and your
environment.
We at CloudComputingGuide.net can also help, as we have been in the hosting
environment for over a decade, and now have experts in cloud computing technology
and platforms. We can help if you need it.
Our Contact Info:
consultants@cloudcomputingguide.net
817-380-5827
We can share with you our expertise, with a brief consultation.

Conclusion
In conclusion we would like to thank you for downloading our guide. Hopefully some of
the confusion and mystification behind cloud computing has been cleared.
Technology is moving forward at an incredible rate, and the platforms that we compute
today will surely evolve into better and more efficient ones tommorrow.
Who knows what the future will hold, but for now, we can embrace the changes that are
taking place all around us. As the saying goes Its evolve, or die. Smart Business is to
look at ways to make your business run smoother, faster, more efficient, and at less
cost to your bottom line.
Again, we thank you for downloading our guide, and ask that you join our newsletter for
more helpful and insightful information from www.cloudcomputingguide.net

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