- [Raf] From now on, we are going to talk
about some concepts related to cloud computing.
So, we figured it would be nice to brief you
about why some people say that the cloud is the new normal.
In this video, I'll give you a brief idea
of what the cloud is,
and tell you some nomenclature you will find,
like software as a service, platform as a service
and infrastructure as a service.
To understand the cloud,
let's compare it
with something you can relate now, traditional IT.
If you remember, at the beginning of the course,
we said that in the traditional IT world,
you need servers and data centers to run your applications.
We also said that data centers are complex
and expensive to maintain.
And to make things even more complicated,
as the demand increases, additional hardware is needed
if you want to grow the infrastructure,
increasing that complexity even more.
Let me use a website
with cooking recipes to illustrate this.
- [Morgan] Well, I think you're going to need this.
- [Raf] Yes, thanks you,
let me transform myself into a chef.
Imagine you are running a server on premises with a website,
and that website provides cooking recipes.
The peak times are right before lunch and dinner time,
which are times when people might visit the websites
to get some ideas on what to cook.
To make sure you have enough infrastructure capacity
to attend that demand,
you bought and installed five additional servers
in the rack, and you are ready.
Bring the traffic, because now you are stronger than ever
in that infrastructure.
Well, that's awesome, but what about 2:00 in the morning?
What about 4:00 in the morning?
What about times where your customers are sleeping
and not getting inspired to cook anything?
During this times,
you would end up having more infrastructure capacity
than needed, and you are unfortunately spending more money
with unused resources.
Even if you turn off this service to save electricity,
you may still have to pay for the physical space
in the data center.
In the infrastructure world of IT,
this is what we call overprovisioning.
Right-sizing infrastructure is a difficult challenge,
and if you're thinking, if there is a way
of dynamically providing infrastructure capacity,
the answer is yes, and it's brought by the cloud.
The cloud is based on a pay-as-you-go model,
meaning that you can dynamically allocate more
or less infrastructure, and only pay
for the corresponding infrastructure that is needed.
No more, no less.
Later in this course, we are going to expand
on the capabilities of what the cloud brings to the table,
but for now,
let tell you about the three types of cloud:
infrastructure as a service, platform as a service,
and software as a service.
All these three provide the pay-as-you-go model,
but they are a little different,
let me explain.
Infrastructure as a service contains
the basic building blocks for cloud IT,
and typically provides access to networking,
compute, and storage features.
When you are using infrastructure as a service,
you are responsible for things like the operating system,
the storage components, and the network.
You can pretty much imagine infrastructure as a service
as a virtual data center capable
of doing dynamic provisioning,
but it gets better.
Now, to the second model, platform as a service.
Platform as a service is
when you have another management layer to help you
with administrative tasks, meaning you can focus
on the deployment and management of applications.
This helps you be more efficient
because you don't need to worry
about software maintenance, patching,
or any of the other heavy lifting involved
in running an application.
A managed database is an example of platform as a service.
You can go to AWS Management Console
and choose a database engine,
then AWS takes care of everything for you,
like configuring the environment,
configuring the connection strings,
and giving you the connection strings to use
in your application.
Last, but not least, software as a service.
This modality provides you
with a product that is fully run and managed
by the service provider.
With software as a service,
you don't need to think about how things are maintained
under the hood.
A common example of software as a service
is a web mail, where you can create mailboxes
for your users to send and receive emails.
You can also find all this information
at aws.amazon.com/types-of-cloud-computing,
types of cloud computing.
That page contains text information regarding
the different models.
Ah, and one last thing,
Amazon Web Services doesn't place itself
as infrastructure, platform, or software as a service.
Instead, we position ourselves
as a cloud computing provider
that empowers you to use the services you need
to build whatever your imagination allows.