Type of Cloud Computing

Type of Cloud Computing

There are 3 different types of cloud computing -

IAAS (Infrastructure as a Service) -

In this you are going to let the 3rd party vendor manage a portion of your business which is going to be the hardware portion.

The third party vendor will manage the servers, storage, virtualization and networking.

You have the control over the software portion such as the applications, data, operating system, middleware and run time.

Ex - Amazon web services

PAAS (Platform as a Service) -

Allows third party vendor not only manages the hardware such as server, storage and networking but they also manage the operating system, middleware and run time.

You are only responsible for the applications and data.

Ex - Microsoft Azure

SAAS (Software as a Service) -

This is the most common cloud service so for.

All the applications are hosted by a third party vendor in the internet.

There is no software to install on your computer, no hardware to manage.

You just simply access and run the applications from your computer when you connect to the cloud service via the internet.

So, the third party vendor manages all the hardware, software, networking, operating system and storage.

Ex - Google maps

NAS (Network Attached Storage) -

Centralized storage device for storing data on a network.

It doesn’t do anything besides storing data.

Will have multiple hard drives in a RAID configuration for redundancy.

It directly attaches to a switch or router on a network so that the data can be accessed over a network.

Once it is on a network, it can be accessed from network devices through a shared folder.

SAN (Storage Area Network) -

It is a special high speed network that stores and provides access to large amounts of data.

This network consists of multiple disk arrays and servers that access this data because that is how operating systems recognize a SAN.

It is recognized as local attached hard drive rather than a shared drive like on an NAS.

SANs are independent of servers, they are not limited or owned by a single server.

Multiple servers are attached to a SAN so all the data is available to all the servers simultaneously.

Easily expandable and very redundant as all data is shared among several disk arrays.

So if a disk array fails, the data is not lost because the data will be stored in a multiple areas.

A SAN is a high speed network.

Interconnected using Fibre Channel (speeds starting at 2000 Mbit/s).

As an alternative to fibre channel, there is ISCSI.

ISCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface) which is a data storage protocol that transports ISCSI request over standard TCP/IP.