2 - Cloud Advantages Flashcards
This cloud advantage replaced capital expenditures (CapEx). Instead, public cloud expenses revolve around this on a monthly basis. For most organizations, this represents significant advantages when compared to significant CapEx investments.
OpEx (Operational Expenditures)
Many public cloud vendors charge on an hourly (if not less) basis. For most services, there is no long-term commitment to an organization. You can roll out new projects or initiatives and, if needed, roll back with no worry of this cloud advantage. This cloud advantage helps increase the agility of IT operations and lowers financial risks associated with innovative technologies.
Lack of contractual commitments
The cloud advantage makes new account establishment with public cloud vendors simple, and prices for the major public cloud vendors continuously reduce. This reduction in prices and the ease of account setup reduces the need for this, as might have existed early in the world of service provider interactions.
Reduction of required negotiations
With this cloud advantage additional resources can be set up with most cloud implementations within seconds.
Reduced procurement delays
With this cloud advantage if more resources are needed to support a growing cloud presence, you can get these resources on demand and pay for them only when needed. Conversely, if fewer resources are required, you can run less and pay for only what you need.
“Pay as you go” model
Because of this cloud advantage you can focus on this for your resources and the cloud provider can focus on their responsibilities (such as physical security and hypervisor security), the resulting infrastructure can meet stringent levels of this. This model is appropriately termed the Shared Responsibility model.
High levels of security possible
Thanks to features in public cloud vendors like AWS, due to this cloud advantage you can quickly scale the cloud-based infrastructure up and down as well as out and in, as needed. This advantage is often termed elasticity. Auto-scaling functionality inside of AWS allows the dynamic creation and destruction of resources based on actual client demand. Such scaling can occur with little to no administrator interaction. When discussing scaling the resources of a service, we are scaling those resources horizontally (out and in with elasticity), while the service made up of those resources is being scaled up and down (vertically because the single service is getting bigger or smaller). A single service scales up and down as well as out and in, depending on the context.
Flexibility
This cloud advantage allows public cloud vendors to offer resources located all over the globe. This global dispersion of resources serves large multinational organizations very well since resources needed for certain parts of the globe can be stored and optimized for access in those regions. Also, companies with clients all over the world can meet with similar access advantages when servicing the needs of clients.
A massive global infrastructure
These cloud offerings allow organizations to choose to give applications to clients, development environments, or even entire IT infrastructures using the technologies that make up the cloud. In fact, since cloud can offer about any component of IT these days, many refer to cloud as an Everything as a Service (XaaS) opportunity.
SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS offerings
Increasingly, cloud vendors are taking this cloud advantage approach. This makes the same configuration possible with REST APIs (typically used) that would be possible with a software development kit (SDK), command-line interface (CLI), or graphical user interface (GUI). This approach means no interface (CLI or GUI) changes are made until these calls are made first. Thus, there is nothing that cannot be automated!
Emphasis on API support or API first approach
