Understanding the benefits of cloud computing

Before cloud computing became an option, companies would have physical network components and server hardware to host roles that would allow them to manage identity, storage, databases, and web applications, among others. Each of these would need skills and cost to install, configure, maintain, patch, and eventually upgrade.

If there was a sudden rise in web requests to one of your web servers, for example, you may have had a drop in service availability because your hardware lacks the resources required. If you predicted the sudden rise, perhaps due to seasonal patterns, you may have gone through a capital expenditure (CapEx) process. Once (if) approvals are obtained and everything gets set up, if the actual traffic isn’t what was forecast, or once the traffic drops again, you might be stuck with expensive hardware that isn’t being fully utilized, while still having ongoing running and maintenance costs (as well as potentially grumpy financial controllers!). This alone presented a problem, and we’re not even touching on disaster recovery or high availability requirements.

Enter cloud computing…

Perhaps the most noticeable change when a company moves to a cloud-based infrastructure is that the requirement to have many physical components is greatly reduced. Identity management can be achieved without a single physical server for you to manage – just log in to a web portal and do everything from there. Users no longer need to be connected directly to your internal network for secure connectivity.

Depending on the service-level agreement (SLA) you have with your cloud provider, even when something goes wrong, the cloud infrastructure can help keep your applications highly available with no noticeable downtime. With the previous scenario of a sudden rise in web requests, you may have decided to scale your application vertically (also known as scaling up/down), providing it with more resources, but that often results in some downtime while the application is upgraded.

You could have configured automatic horizontal scaling (also known as scaling in/out) – if your application hits a certain metric, more instances of your application could be automatically created to handle the spike, and the number of instances could be scaled back down automatically once demand reduces again – preventing any downtime while being cost-effective.

To demonstrate this, I created a web app in Microsoft Azure that only took 30 seconds to create and be up and running, and then configured auto-scaling. When monitoring the instances of my web app, there was a spike in the number of requests (the lower line) over a period, the instances (the upper line) increased to 2, and once that spike subsided, the instances were reduced to 1:

Figure 1.1 – Auto scaled instances during a requests spike

Due to the elasticity that cloud computing brings, my application had the resources it needed without any downtime and scaled the resources back down when they were no longer needed. I mentioned that I was able to provision my web app and have it accessible to the internet in just 30 seconds – no CapEx, no hardware, no delays, and no complications. I had the option to deploy the app to one of many locations around the world, thanks to the global distribution of my cloud provider’s data centers.

With cloud computing, you not only have all the benefits mentioned here and more, but because cloud services are typically consumption-based, you only pay for the resources you use. No upfront costs, just operational expenditure (OpEx) costs, depending on what you use. To some, one of the biggest benefits of cloud computing is that you no longer need to deal with quite as much of an Ethernet jungle as before. As this chapter is intended to recap these fundamentals, we won’t delve any deeper at this time.

With the benefits just covered and many others, it’s no surprise that the number of workloads being migrated to the cloud is increasing exponentially. When thinking about moving workloads to the cloud, it’s important to understand the hosting options available to you, the most common of which we will cover in the next section.