Introducing Core Concepts of Cloud Infrastructure
Everyone is migrating to the Cloud or is exposed to it one way or another. Whether you are looking into AWS, Azure or Google to host your infrastructure let’s cover some basics common themes. We will cover Compute, Storage, Networking and IAM in this post aimed at beginners who are new to Cloud Infrastructure.
Compute
Compute can be summed up as CPU, Memory or GPU hosted on the Cloud Provider. Whether we host a Wordpress website, an API or train a machine learning model, it requires CPU, Memory and/or GPU. Compute can come in many flavours such as Virtual Machines, Managed Kubernetes Clusters or Serverless offerings. For example AWS provide EC2 for VMs, ECS (Elastic Container Service) or EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) and Fargate for serverless.
Storage
Compute normally goes hand in hand with Storage. Storage is disk space or managed storage. This can range from a disk that attaches to your Virtual Machine hosted in the Cloud to an Object store to host static files for a website. Most Cloud Providers provide managed storage such as a managed MySQL or Document Store with MongoDB API bindings. For example Azure provide Azure Database for MySQL as a managed relational database and Azure BLOB storage as a managed object store. For more details on what BLOB storage is please go here.
Network
Networking allows our Compute resources to communicate with our storage resources or internal networks or simply exposes our website to the world or a private network. This section covers a wide range of services such as DNS, CDN, NAT, Subnets, Firewalls, Public IPs and more. For example GCP provide Cloud DNS to host your DNS and Cloud CDN to host your static content.
IAM
Identity and Access Management covers how authentication and authorisation takes place in the Cloud Environment. Each Provider has their own managed offering such as AWS has robust IAM options, Azure has Azure Active Directory and GCP has GSuite.
Mixing and Matching
Many times Cloud Providers will bundle Compute, Storage, Networking and IAM together to take away the complexity of managing each individually. An example can be of Amazon Lightsail or Azure Web App Service to make whole experience simpler and more welcoming to beginners.
Let’s finish here. Compute, Storage, Networking and IAM are basics of Cloud Infrastructure and understanding them can help get the full value out of your Cloud Provider or simply to evaluate your options.
