Cloud Deployment Models:

A cloud deployment model is used to represent a specific cloud environment type, differentiated based on the type of users availing the cloud models.

The four common cloud deployment models are –

1. Public Cloud
2. Private Cloud
3. Hybrid Cloud
4. Community Cloud

What is a Public cloud?

Public cloud is a cloud environment owned by a third-party cloud provider that enables the availability of resources such as applications, virtual machines, etc., to the general public over the internet.

Few of such providers are Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure.

Public Cloud:

A public cloud being a fully virtualized environment provides services in a multi-tenant fashion. Each tenant’s data remains separated from other’s data.

The success of a public cloud relies on a high bandwidth network connectivity enabling faster data transmission.

Salient Examples

• Cloud storage services
• Online software applications
• Cloud hosting and the list grows.

Benefits of Public Cloud

• Scalability: On-demand availability of resources.

• Cost Effective: Expenditure reduced due to centralized management of resources.

• Reliability: Backup support enabled in case of failures.

• Flexibility: Offers all services such as IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.

• Location Independent: Services are enabled to consumers anywhere and anytime

Private Cloud

Private cloud is also recognized as an internal cloud or corporate cloud.

Usually built and owned within an organization and is a secured cloud-based environment accessible only for the organization.

In a private cloud:

• Administration can be done either by an internal or by an outsourced staff.
• Same organization technically plays both the roles of cloud consumer and cloud provider.

Private cloud is most ideal for the organizations which require direct control over the environments to meet security and business compliance requirements.

Benefits of Private Cloud:

• Higher Security and Privacy: Achieved using access restrictions to connections made to resources.

• Legal Compliance: Can be deployed in accordance with any retention and access-control policies.

• Better Control: Since private cloud can be accessed only by a single organization, that organization will configure and manage it based on their needs.

Hybrid Cloud:

The hybrid cloud environment is a combination of both private and public clouds.

Organizations use a Hybrid cloud to deploy private clouds for critical workloads and a public cloud to host less critical (or less sensitive) workloads.

An e-commerce website could be an ideal example. It can be hosted within a private cloud for better security, while its brochure site can be hosted within a public cloud for cost-effectiveness.

Establishing a Hybrid Cloud:

If your organization wishes to establish a hybrid cloud, it needs to ensure:

• Availability of a Public IaaS platform (such as AWS, Microsoft Azure).

• Availability of a private cloud (on-premises or through a private cloud provider).

• Ensure adequate WAN (wide area network) connectivity between the two cloud environments.

Typically, an enterprise opts for a public cloud for accessing compute instances, storage resources or other services like big data analytics and it must develop its own private cloud that is compatible with the public cloud.

Community Cloud:

A community cloud is a multi-tenant platform allowing several groups with the same purpose to work on a single platform.

• Similar to a public cloud but with access restricted to a limited set of people.

• Owned jointly by the community members or by a third-party cloud provider.

• The community members typically own the responsibility for defining and evolving the cloud environment.

Deployment Models:

When it comes to cloud computing, we have a couple of different deployment models of how we can actually do this, if you will. So, there are different deployment models for cloud computing.

Now, each describes a way that clouds infrastructure is going to be deployed either privately or we can put it out there to the public, also we can do a little combination of both. Now, we have types of Cloud Deployment Models i.e. public cloud computing, we have private cloud computing, and then like I said, we have a little bit of both, that hybrid cloud computing, and then a special one out there, we have what’s known as community cloud computing.

Let’s take a look at these four things. So that public cloud computing.

Now, this is going to be hosted off-site, because we are putting this out there in the public cloud, on the Internet.

We’re not taking care of this. It’s going to be owned by a third-party company that actually sells those cloud services to the public in a multi-tenant fashion. Meaning they own a part of the cloud let’s say, they own some infrastructure that’s out there available to everybody, but they don’t just sell it to one company, they might sell it to many different companies or many different organizations, that’s what makes it that multi-tenant fashion there, because they don’t just have their infrastructure in place for one customer, there are many, many customers out there.

So like I mentioned earlier, we can get on any cloud provider, we can get on a search engine, look that up, say, cloud providers and we can buy that as the public, or I could get that as an individual person if I wanted to, I could also, you know, get an enterprise-level type public cloud computing for my organization or for my enterprise, if I wanted to as well. So, some examples of that, you know, we’ve got cloud service providers like Google, they provide computing resources where the public, you know, can freely use it if we wanted to get out there and just test it and see how we wanted to do it.

Now, these free ones, they are not going to be, I don’t want to say fully-functional, but they’re not going to give you all the bells and whistles like you’re going to get with the paid services.

And then we have private cloud computing:

Now, this is typically built to be used with inside our organization, it’s behind our firewall, it’s on the inside maybe part of our intranet, where only our employees can get to this private cloud. So, it’s most often developed and run by the organization’s IT department or IT team.

It could be held off-site and ran by a third-party, but it’s going to be closed off, it’s still going to be private, other tenants will not be allowed to get there, because well then, we’d be in that public cloud computing model and that’s not what we want. So an international organization might develop a private cloud service. So for example, you know, to provide…why would they do that? Well, it would be to provide those computing resources, like I said, to those employees in different geographic locations.

So again, it’s taken care of by the organization, by the company itself. It could be run by third-party, not usually.

If you want it totally private, you would run it yourself, take care of it yourself behind your firewalls, or, you know, connect it to different geographic locations, but it’s still part of your organization.

Then we have that hybrid cloud computing:

This is that combination of clouds, usually of different types, usually, it’s a public and a private. So those clouds maintain their own characteristics, but they’re going to be bound together to form that single unit.

So, this can offer standardized or proprietary access to data, and it can give us some of that application portability. So some examples for this would be like organizations in the process of converting to cloud computing, they might use that hybrid cloud while they transition from, you know, that more traditional storage system that everybody’s pretty much used to – we talked about SANs and NAS, that would be a traditional storage system – to a cloud-based storage system, which could still be a SANs by the way, but we don’t see that as much.

Let me rephrase that, we see it, but we don’t see how it’s done, I should say, the traditional storage system we might understand the underlying, the way it’s been set up, and the cloud-based, we just usually see the front-end of that as well.

And then we have that community cloud computing. Now, this is open to public inter-networks that enable clients to find resources on demand. So, what this does is separates an organization from the cloud resource providers.

There’s not usually any contracts and agreements before the clients can access the content they require. Another thing about community cloud computing, it’s not usually run by one entity or one organization, like you would have with your private or public or your hybrid, that would belong to say a company or an organization or an enterprise.

In community cloud computing, that’s not necessarily the case, you have many different organizations contributing and taking care of this data. That’s why it’s open, and that’s what enables the clients to find those resources on demand because it is open to everybody and lots of different organizations take care of it. So there’s no proprietary information out there, it’s a community cloud computing.