OpenStack and OpenShift

Both OpenStack and OpenShift Origin are open source projects, and both provide cloud computing foundations. However, they do not compete with each other.

OpenStack provides “Infrastructure-as-a-Service”, or “IaaS”. It provides bootable virtual machines, networking, block storage, object storage, and so forth. Some IaaS service providers based on OpenStack are HP Cloud and Rackspace Cloud. Red Hat is fully engaged with the larger OpenStack user and developer community. Our developers are the source of a significant amount of code to implement features and fix bugs in the OpenStack projects.

The OpenShift hosted service provides “Platform-as-a-Service” or “PaaS”. It provides the necessary parts to quickly deploy and run a LAMP application: the web server, application server, application runtimes and libraries, database service, and so forth.

OpenShift Origin is the open source project of the software that enables the OpenShift hosted service. Using OpenShift Origin, you can build your own PaaS.

A PaaS typically runs on top of an IaaS provider. For example, both the OpenShift hosted service and the Heroku hosted service run on top of Amazon’s AWS IaaS service.


OpenShift Origin can run on top of OpenStack. For example, our Krishna Raman has written a blog post: OpenShift Origin on OpenStack which describes step by step how to set it up.

In addition to OpenShift Origin being able to run on top of OpenStack, it can run on top of AWS, it can run on top of KVM or VMware in your own data center, it can run on top of Virtual Box in your personal laptop, and it can even run on top of “bare metal” unvirtualized Linux hosts.

So, when I am asked “How does OpenShift relate to OpenStack?”, I answer “OpenShift Origin can run on top of OpenStack. They are complementary projects that work well together. OpenShift Origin is not presently part of OpenStack, and does not compete with OpenStack. If you stand up your own OpenStack system, you can make it even more useful by installing OpenShift Origin on top of it.”

Cloud Native Landscape

Three most Common Cloud Native Development and Deployment Model

1. Kubernetes: (Containers) Full control over infrastructureand maximum portability.

2. CloudFoundry: (Applications) Focus on the applications and let the platform handle the rest.

3. Apache OpenWhisk: (Functions) Auto-Scaled, event-driven applications that respond to a variety of triggers.

Containers vs serverless - Navigating application deployment options from Daniel Krook

Choosing the right cloud provider - AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud Platform

There are three main players in the race for cloud services providers - between them, they provide all products you might need for moving your business to the cloud. But these product offerings differ in pricing as well as the naming of their services - which can be confusing at times.

Here’s a quick guide to compare the services provided by the three main players - Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Please note - this is by no means a comprehensive document - the product offerings by AWS, Azure and GCP are vast and it is always a good option to consult with a trusted technology partner to select the correct provider for your requirements. This guide is intended to make you familiar with some of the most commonly needed products for cloud.

Why move to the cloud?

Companies from both the public & private sector (Netflix, AirBNB, PBS and many more) increasingly rely on cloud services for their online operations. This allows them to concentrate on their core business idea and leave the infrastructure needs to the experts. In this day and age of constantly changing demand, setting up a physical infrastructure to provide such online services would get very expensive and time-consuming - with a team of technicians, lot of extra budget for servers, constantly changing hardware requirements and so on. With the help of cloud offerings provided by these players, a lot of startups find it quick and affordable to start their own ventures without these technical challenges.

Pricing

Pricing for products and services you use from these providers will depend largely on the computing power you need, the number of instances you deploy and the location. But some major advantages of using the cloud as compared to setting up your own physical infrastructure are

• No upfront investment
• Pay for what you use
• No termination fees
• Easy scaling up/scaling down

You can read up about the pricing details here - AWS, GCP, Azure

Amazon Web Services (AWS) vs Microsoft Azure vs Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Amazon introduced IaaS (Infrastructure As A Service) at their first AWS service launched in 2004. It has been a front-runner in the race and has since kept adding features and offerings - giving them an upper hand over competition. To an extent, they are the most expensive in some regards. But they are also the best in terms of service offerings. Google and Microsoft joined the bandwagon later but quickly caught up. This did help bring down the prices which ultimately helps consumers.

Here’s a quick comparison of all the offerings provided by AWS, Azure and GCP and how it affects pricing.

1. Computation Power

This is the core of the services offered by computers - to calculate, to process data — to compute. To get faster processing for data analysis, graphics rendering or faster response time, you either need more hardware OR you can go to the cloud. If you buy hardware, it is yours. But it is also very expensive - purchasing, maintenance and all the idle time where they are not in use. On the other hand, moving to the cloud, you only pay for what you use and it is much easier and faster to scale up or scale down depending on the demand.

Amazon provides EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), their on-demand scalable instances. Google provides Compute Engine and Azure has Virtual Machines. While EC2 is arguably the most comprehensive, it can burn a hole in your pocket if you are not careful - the pricing is also a little complex to understand. The same goes for Microsoft Azure’s VMs as well. Google’s Compute Engine has very simple pricing, but it is also the least flexible.

With AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Google App Engine, you also have the option of buying computing processes for mobile and web apps - which significantly reduces cost compared to using EC2 or Compute Engine IF your app fits the specs for these services.

All three providers provide Docker capabilities with AWS ECS, Google Container Engine and Azure Container service.

Azure has another advantage in that it allows deploying Windows client apps with a RemoteApp service which the other two lack.

2. Storage

Storage is another important criteria for cloud services. Using any of these cloud providers, you can store data to the tune of some GBs to many petabytes.

For storage, Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) has been around for long and is very well documented with many samples as well as third-party libraries. Google’s Cloud Storage and Azure’s Storage also provide equally reliable services, but their resources are not as extensive as S3. Although, Google and Azure somewhat beat S3 on the pricing.

Service	Provider	Pricing
Cloud Storage	Google	$0.026 (standard) / $0.02 (Durable Reduced Availability)
Data Lake Storage	Azure	$0.04
S3	AWS	$0.03 (standard) / $0.0125 (infrequent)
Azure Storage	Azure	$0.024 (Locally Redundant) / $0.048 (Geographically Redundant) / $0.061 (Read access - Geographically Redundant)
Block Storage	Rackspace	$0.12
Cloud Files	Rackspace	$0.1

Archiving services are provided at lower rates compared to cloud storage, but it also provides lower access speed. Archiving services are generally used for storing objects which are not accessed regularly. The archiving services provided by Amazon, Azure and GCP are Glacier (AWS), Azure Backup (Azure) and Cloud Storage Nearline (GCP). Azure and AWS also provide solutions for archiving - Data Archive (AWS), Backup and Archive (Azure)

Service	Provider	Pricing
Cloud Storage Nearline	Google	$0.01 (storage) + $0.01 (retrieval)
Glacier	AWS	$0.007
Storage	Azure	$0.01 (Locally Redundant) / $0.02 (Geographically Redundant) / $0.025 (Read access - Geographically Redundant)

Apart from storage and archiving, all three providers also provide services for creating content delivery networks. AWS provides CloudFront, Azure has a Content Delivery Network and GCP has Cloud CDN.

3. Analytics

Now comes the interesting and probably a very important part - using the computing, storage and content delivery using analytics. Usually when it comes to solutions hosted on the cloud, they deal with large data sets (big data). And unless we use analytics on this data and gather some important insights, it is pretty much useless.

Analytics on big data can help with many things - predictions, new offerings, cross-selling and so on. But analytics on such large data sets requires specific tools and programming models. Google was forefront in this race due to MapReduce - they came up with a number of products for users - BigQuery, Cloud Dataproc (managed Spack & Hadoop), Cloud Dataflow (data processing in real time), Cloud Datalab, Cloud Pub/Sub (streaming data and messaging) and even Genomics (for processing genomic data)!

Amazon provides Elastic MapReduce and Azure provides HDInsight. All three also provide various Big Data Solutions you can use. You can find them here - GCP Big Data solutions, AWS Big Data offerings, Azure Big Data solutions.

While Google has taken the lead on Big Data, Amazon takes the cake with QuickSight - an offering they provide for businesses to make sense of large amounts of structured and unstructured data. It helps businesses identify opportunities based on data sets and various strategies. This helps businesses where they don’t see the need to have a team of data scientists implementing solutions for analyzing their data - but still need to gather insights from the data they capture.

Analytics will also likely require you to use Machine Learning. Google is ahead in the race on this one too, with Cloud Machine Learning as well as offering products which they use for their own apps in specific areas - Cloud Vision, Speech, Natural Language Processing and Translate. The Cloud ML alternatives provided by AWS and Azure are Amazon Machine Learning and Azure Machine Learning.

4. Location

When deploying your cloud services, location is very important - you should choose a data center which is close to your primary users. For instance if you are providing services to users in the East Coast of United States, it would be best to deploy your services there. This will reduce the response time and also offer better user experience. CDNs also help here for faster delivery of resources.

AWS regions

Amazon wins hands-down in this area - it has  the most extensive coverage closely followed by Azure (although Azure has very good coverage in Asia). Google has a good coverage in United States, but not so much in Europe or Asia.

Azure regions

When selecting the location, do keep in mind that different locations cost different. United States and Europe generally offer the cheapest options. You can find more information here - AWS global reach, Azure regions, Google cloud locations

Google cloud locations

5. Other products & services

These are the main service offerings provided by any cloud providers. But that is not the end. Here’s a quick list of other resources/services you might be interested in

a. Networking

1. DNS - Amazon Route 53, Google DNS, Azure DNS
2. Virtual Private Networks - Amazon VPC, Google Cloud Virtual Network, Azure VPN Gateway
3. Load Balancing - Amazon ELB, Google Cloud Load Balancing, Azure Load Balancer

b. Database

1. SQL - Amazon RDS (has support for multiple DBMS), Azure SQL Database, SQL Data warehouse, SQL Server stretch database, Google Cloud SQL (only supports MySQL as of now)
2. NoSQL - Amazon DynamoDB, Azure DocumentDB and Table storage,Google Bigtable and Cloud Datastore
3. Cache services - Amazon ElastiCache, Azure Redis
4. Other cloud database offerings by Amazon

Then there’s developer tools, security offerings, disaster recovery tools and so on.

Other Service Providers

While Amazon, Microsoft and Google are the big names in cloud providers, there are many small providers who offer some very competitive pricing. Many of them focus on indie developers rather than companies and can be worth giving a shot - esp if you need moderate scaling. Some examples include

• Digital Ocean
• Rackspace Cloud
• Linode
• Vultr

Use COM- A New Approach to Build Next-Gen Cloud Applications

What is COM? 

COM stands for Container, Open source and Microservice. In late 1990s, .com revolution transformed the way computing was done. Today, containers and microservices are transforming the way cloud computing is done. Microservices architecture is not just an IT buzzword anymore. Many companies have successfully adapted microservices architecture to develop highly scalable cloud applications. Cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc. are building an ecosystem to facilitate application development using containers and microservices. No wonder open-source community played a significant role in this revolution. If you are wondering how the the next-gen scalable cloud applications will be built, COM approach is one of the most promising alternatives. 

Why COM ?

• Containers: Build, ship and Run anywhere. A docker container can run on Bare Metal, VM, AWS, Azure, Google, Digital Ocean. Docker1.2 provides native support for Mac and Windows too. 
• Open source: It's open source, duh!
• Microservices: Scale, flexibility, system resilience. Monoliths are bad for health!

COM Ecosystem

Building an individual microservice might be easy. Challenge is to integrate all services to build the complete solution. Therefore, for building COM based applications, following aspects need to be considered. 

Containerizing a service: While packaging a service in the container, we must remember that container is NOT a VM. Some of the best practices while building containers are one process per container, ephemeral behavior (can be stopped and a new one can be put in place with an absolute minimum of set-up and configuration). 

Service discovery: COM based cloud application can have hundreds and thousands of containers coming up and going down continuously. Hardcoded IP addresses or traditional DNS based service discovery will not be useful in such scenarios. We need to use a dynamic and scalable service discovery solutions. Open source solutions like zookeper, consule are the suitable for such use cases. 

Service-service communication: For synchronous communication, REST/JSON has been a de-facto standard for past several years. However, other promising alternatives like grpc/protbuf, thrift have emerged. These RPC frameworks take advantage of new HTTP2 (introduced in 2015), binary protocols and bi-direction streaming. For async communication, frameworks such as AMQP, STOMP have been widely used in the industry. 

Monitoring and logging: With hundreds of containers running in the system, we need specialized solutions such as fluetd, datadog, cAdvisor for system monitoring and logging. 

Automation and CI/CD: Building and deploying microservices without proper automation and CI/CD can prove to be the worst nightmare for an engineering team. Apart from traditional deployment techniques, engineering/devops team needs to consider container orchestration and container networking mechanism. 

The following mind map gives an overview of COM ecosystem. This is definitely not an exhaustive list, however it could be a good starting point for exploring various available options.

References

Linux Foundation : Introduction to cloud infrastructure technologies

Martin Fowler: http://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html

Docker best practices : https://docs.docker.com/engine/userguide/eng-image/dockerfile_best-practices/

Note : The acronym COM used here is meant only for the purpose of explanation. It is not a standard acronym.

Openstack tutorial for beginners | Fundamentals

Ooredoo Kuwait rolls out unified cloud for NFV

Ooredoo Kuwait has successfully deployed network functions virtualisation (NFV) architecture and its IT applications on a single, unified cloud, it was announced this week.

The single cloud is based on VMware's vCloud for NFV platform, and was rolled out as part of Ooredoo's ‘Unify' initiative, which aims to take advantage of a software-defined data centre architecture, as well as NFV and software-defined networking (SDN).

VMware's professional services team partnered with the operator and its virtual network functions (VNF) vendor, Huawei, to design and deploy the VMware vCloud for NFV platform and virtual network functions into a test environment in less than three months. The solution supported the seamless transfer of the virtualised Core IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) from test environment to Ooredoo's production IT environment, and enabled Ooredoo to conduct its first voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) call.

"Reliability and availability were key factors in our decision to work with VMware. The production-proven VMware technology and our previous experience with the high levels of technical support offered by VMware professional services gave us the confidence to move to a unified cloud platform," said Mijbil Al-Ayoub, director of Corporate Comms, Ooredoo Kuwait.

"The speed at which we have been able to trial our unified cloud and onboard the VoLTE service functions into our IT network has exceeded our expectations. We did a joint R&D project that took only two months to complete, and we finalised the development of our vIMS product that can be deployed in a production, commodity infrastructure, automatically in only 3.5 hours."

The Ooredoo platform uses VMware's policy-based resource allocation features to maintain application service level agreement (SLA) enforcement, and software-defined networking capabilities of the VMware NSX network virtualisation platform to address NFV network scalability needs, multi-tenancy with microsegmentation, capacity on demand and QoS. VMware NSX is a main pillar in segregating tenants across Ooredoo‘s single converged private cloud.

"We're delighted to be working with such forward-thinking customers who understand the value of a platform-based deployment strategy for NFV," said David Wright, vice president, Telecommunications and NFV Group, VMware.

"By making the decision to deploy and manage a horizontally virtualised platform capable of supporting multivendor VNFs and IT workloads, Ooredoo Kuwait has created a powerful service environment capable of delivering high-value services to customers while managing operational costs."

Wait is over - Cisco CCNA & CCNP Cloud Certification Available

Cisco Cloud certification programs build and validate basic through advanced knowledge of the skills required to design, install, and maintain Cisco Cloud solutions. The curricula emphasize real-world best practices through labs and course materials.

Cisco Cloud certification programs are practical, relevant, and job-ready certification curricula, closely aligned with the specific tasks expected of today’s in-demand Cloud professionals. The Cisco Cloud certification program validates the skill set of individuals on industry-leading Cloud solutions and best practices as well as offering job-role-based curricula for all levels of IT staff.

Cisco Cloud portfolio consists of an associate CCNA level and professional CCNP level certifications. The program gives students an opportunity to take advantage of the promise of cloud and receive training that enables them to start a career in Cloud and/or make the transition from Data Center and Networking job roles.

The cloud portfolio covers the breadth of cloud products and technologies deployed in mid-sized to large networks utilizing Cisco cloud solutions.  The curricula emphasize real-world best practices through labs and course materials covering:

• Private and Hybrid Cloud Design
• Cloud Security Design
• Cloud Infrastructure Implementation
• ACI and APIC Automation
• Private and Hybrid IaaS Provisioning
• Application Provisioning and Life Cycle Management
• Cloud Systems Management 

CCNA Cloud

CCNA Cloud is a job role-based career certification that trains and certifies Cloud engineers, Cloud administrators, and network engineers. Cloud engineers and administrators can enhance and demonstrate key skills, while network engineer can extend their careers into Cloud. This certification prepares you for work in an SMB Cloud environment and to support a senior Cloud engineer in an enterprise environment.

Job duties include entry-level provisioning and support of Cisco Cloud solutions.

The CCNA Cloud certification can also provide career opportunities for employees of business and channel partner organizations transitioning from other technical areas such as Data Center or Networking.

Topics covered in CCNA Cloud include:

• Cloud Characteristics and Models
• Cloud Deployments
• Basic Knowledge of Cloud Compute
• Basic Knowledge of Cloud Networking
• Provide End-User Support
• Cloud Infrastructure Administration and Reporting
• Chargeback and Billing Reports
• Cloud Provisioning
• Cloud Systems Management and Monitoring
• Cloud Remediation

The CCNA Cloud certification is an associate-level certification that is valid for three years.

Achieving CCNA Cloud Certification

There are no prerequisites for CCNA Cloud certification. Completion of the CCNA Cloud certification requires the exams and recommended training shown in the table below.

Exams & Recommended Training

Required Exam(s)	Recommended Training
210-451 CLDFND	Understanding Cisco Cloud Fundamentals (CLDFND)
210-455 CLDADM*	Introducing Cisco Cloud Administration (CLDADM)*

*More information available July 2015

http://www.cisco.com/web/learning/certifications/associate/ccna_cloud/index.html



CCNP Cloud Certification

The CCNP Cloud is a job role-based career certification intended to distinguish Cloud engineers, administrators, designers, and architects, who design, implement, provision and troubleshoot Cisco Cloud and Intercloud solutions. It provides you with the skills to help your IT organization meet changing business demands, technology transitions, and deliver important business outcomes.

This certification prepares you to work in a SMB Cloud environment as well as perform the duties of a senior Cloud engineer in an enterprise environment.

The CCNP Cloud certification is a professional-level certification that is valid for three years.

Achieving CCNP Cloud Certification

Prerequisite Skills and Requirements

A valid Cisco CCNA Cloud or any Cisco CCIE certification can act as a prerequisite. Completion of the CCNP Cloud certification requires the exams and recommended training shown in the table below.

Prerequisites

Valid CCNA Cloud certification or any CCIE certification can act as a prerequisite.

Exams & Recommended Training

Required Exam(s)*	Recommended Training*
300-504 CLDINF	Implementing and Troubleshooting the Cisco Cloud Infrastructure (CLDINF)
300-505 CLDDES	Designing the Cisco Cloud (CLDDES)
300-506 CLDAUT	Automating the Cisco Enterprise Cloud (CLDAUT)
300-507 CLDDACI	Building the Cisco Cloud with Application Centric Infrastructure (CLDDACI)

*More information available August 2015

http://www.cisco.com/web/learning/certifications/professional/ccnp_cloud/index.html

Future of the Network Documentary

Part 1 - M2M and the Internet of Things: Brace for Impact

Part 2 - Broadband Capacity: Are We Ready?

Part 3 - Uncovering Software-Defined Networking

Part 4 - The Cloud: Building in Mid-Air

Part 5 - The Value Chain: Building Value in the Chain

10 Skills IT Pros Need for Cloud Computing

IT professionals have to work constantly to ensure that their skills are up to date. Today, IT pros must guarantee that their cloud-focused skills are resume-ready. And just what are those skills? According to a Forbes.com blog post by contributor Joe McKendrick, there are eight key skills. To those, I add two more.

1. Business and financial skills

The intersection of business and technology is always an overarching concern, but it is especially so when it comes to cloud-based computing.

2. Technical skills

With the cloud, organizations can streamline their IT resources, offloading much of day-to-day systems and application management. But that doesn’t mean IT abdicates all responsibility. There’s a need for language skills to build applications that can run quickly on the Internet.

3. Enterprise architecture and business needs analysis

Cloud computing requires that IT pros cross disciplines, especially where service-oriented architecture comes into play.

4. Project management skills

Organizations must not let the flexibility of the cloud lead to missed deadlines or amorphous goals. That could negate the cloud cost advantage.

5. Contract and vendor negotiation skills

To deal with service-level agreements—and the problems involved when those SLAs are breached—IT pros need experience with contract and vendor negotiations.

6. Security and compliance

IT professionals dealing with the cloud must have a firm grasp of security protocols and the regulatory mandates related to their industries, both within and without the United States.

7. Data integration and analysis skills

IT pros may not be data scientists, but to take advantage of big data, they do need to help data scientists hook up big data, internal ERP, data warehouse and other data systems, and work with the business side to make effective use of big data.

8. Mobile app development and management

Organizations need to think about what kind of mobile experience they are offering to customers via the cloud and how they would like to improve that down the line.
As enterprise cloud computing evolves, it is important to add two more skills to the list:

9. Knowledge of open hybrid clouds

IT is not homogeneous, and neither should your cloud computing model be. IT pros need to understand how to build and extend their companies’ cloud computing infrastructure in a way that is open.

10. Understanding of OpenStack

In order to build the kind of flexible, secure, interoperable cloud infrastructure mentioned above, IT pros must have a strong understanding of the technology required to make it so. OpenStack is a key component. OpenStack, a collaboration of developers and cloud computing technologists, comprises a series of projects delivering various components for a cloud infrastructure solution.

Cloud Computing Glossary: 21 Terms You Need to Know Before Splurging on the Cloud

Cloud computing has gotten too big to ignore. Consumers and companies alike are keeping their eyes peeled to determine whether it’s a viable solution to their storage, application, or infrastructure requirements. Rapid evolution of both the technology and terminology around this trend can easily lead to a state of confusion. This mini cloud computing glossary will help you navigate your way through all the jargon as you size up different vendors and solutions.

1. Cloud application: A software program that is installed on a remote server and delivered over the internet. The software can typically be accessed from a web-based interface on any device with an internet connection. Category wise, cloud applications range from email marketing platforms to office productivity suites.

2. Cloud computing: A concept that makes computing resources available on an on-demand, pay-as-you-go basis from a massive flock of networked servers. The cloud may deliver storage capacity,  applications, and various network resources based on individual needs.

3. Cloud Delivery Network (CDN):  A large collection of global servers deployed over the internet. The network is designed to distribute content in high availability, high-performance fashion as resources can literally be sent to millions of end users in milliseconds.

4. Cloud hosting : A form of internet hosting that allows customers to harness website capacity, bandwidth, and other resources from virtual servers on an underlying infrastructure compromised of physical servers. It is viewed as a more flexible and scalable alternative to traditional shared and dedicated hosting as clients can tap into the amount of resources they require while only paying for what they use.

5. Cloud Operating System (OS): A scaled down, web-based OS that provides access to music, email, file storage, and other back-end cloud services. JoliCloud, SilveOS, and Zero PC are some of the most well known cloud operating systems.

6. Cloud Service Provider (CSP): A firm that provides one or more cloud computing services to clients. These services are typically delivered from a multi-tenant infrastructure that uses virtualization to isolate one user environment from another.

7. Cloud reseller: A firm that purchases that purchases cloud computing services from a larger parent company and resells those services to clients of their own. In many cases, the reseller is able to sell the solutions under their own brand without customers being aware of the parent company’s involvement.

8. Cloud storage: A storage system that resides on a cloud infrastructure. Cloud storage services are offered by numerous third-party companies and allow users to save specified amounts of data over the internet.

9. Cluster: A group of connected computers that work together to perform a single task to maximize the performance and availability of the service at hand. In cloud computing environments, clusters can be scaled via APIs that allow users to add or subtract machines based on individual needs.

10.  Database-as-a-Service (DaaS): A hosted database service operated from a cloud infrastructure. DaaS gives clients the ability to control their databases and scale on demand while removing the burden of maintaining the database system and underlying hardware.

11. Elasticity: Refers to the ability of a given cloud component to increase or decrease resources based on a scale that is as close to specific usage needs as possible. An example could involve a company that needs to double its amount of bandwidth at peak hours during the day, and then drop it by half when traffic is slow during the evening to control costs.

12. Hardware-as-a-Service (HaaS): A service model that allows customers to procure hardware on a leased or licensed basis. This type of service is still fairly popular with managed service providers who allow clients to install and operate the equipment in their own facility for a fee they often roll into a monthly subscription. By reducing upfront costs, HaaS can be a cost effective way for SMBs to accommodate immediate hardware needs.

13. Hybrid cloud: An environment that integrates one or more publicly accessible cloud infrastructures with a private cloud maintained in-house. The public cloud may be used to support everyday business email operations while the private version handles top-secret data behind a tightly controlled firewall. Hybrid clouds can be managed by systems that allow for the centralized administration of both environments.

14. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS): A cloud computing service that delivers storage, servers, applications, and other network resources on demand, typically in a virtualized format. IaaS is billed on a pricing model that charges customer for the amount of resources they use.

15. Multi-tenancy: Refers to an arrangement that involves multiple customers using the same public cloud service. Cloud security and privacy concerns are mainly tied to multi-tenancy as a single attack could technically compromise several other people using the service. However, public cloud services remain popular while multi-tenancy improves simplicity, flexibility, and cost efficiency for the vendor.

16. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): A cloud computing service that delivers computing platforms as a resource or service on-demand. These platforms may include operating systems, web servers, databases, and other tools used to build applications. PaaS is commonly used by developers who need the ability to create custom apps without the hassle of managing the many platforms the task requires.

17. Private cloud: An environment that delivers computing resources over a private network or the internet. Even in the latter case, private cloud resources can be delivered by third-party vendors who exclusively distribute services to a single organization.

18. Public cloud: An environment that delivers computing resources over the publicly accessible internet. These services can be used by anyone and blended with private infrastructures for maximum flexibility. Most commercially available cloud services are delivered from a public infrastructure.

19. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS): A cloud computing service that delivers software applications over the internet. Since these cloud apps are run and maintained on remote servers, organizations save local resources while eliminating the technical challenges of managing the software. SaaS is typically billed on a subscription-based, or per-user basis.

20. Subscription-based pricing: A pricing model that allows customers to buy cloud services for a certain amount over a specific time period. A SaaS provider, for example, may charge $9.99 per month to use a video editing app for six months, and then require renewal at the end of the period.

21. Utility computing: A leased method of procuring computing resources comparable to electricity and other residential utility services. It is often used to describe the cloud concept, which is a form of utility computing.

There are plenty more terms where this batch came from. Still, with a good understanding of the essentials, you’ll be able to easily follow the cloud convo when vendors and colleagues get all techie on you.