I`am going to talk about little bit history today, how things were before the Cloud era. It is important to know how we got here in the first place.

How things were,

Not long back, the IT infrastructure was limited to the term “On site Systems/Networks”. A company would have a separate data center on premise and/or in a separate geographical location but the fact is they own and maintain it.
How hard can it be…
I`m afraid “Very” is the word looking for.

In order to have an own data center they needed,

• Dedicated space for housing infrastructure
• High bandwidth internet provider with high availability
• Extremely redundant power source
• Dust free controlled environment with industrial level cooling systems
• High physical security
• Inter data center networks
• Data recovery systems
• Expert datacenter management staff

are some of the very expensive hurdles they had to cover. It is extremal costly to manage an own data center for a small business company and it is not much of a difference to a large company as well.

In order to overcome this barrier Shared Data Center come into play.

Shared Data Center – Managed Services

There are many names out there, but the base is, it is someone else computer even though it is not as simple as said.

What happens here is let someone else manage and own the data center. In that way the data center users do not have to worry about the infrastructure problems and the huge cost. However, this will not be possible without virtualization.

Going cloud with Virtualization

I`m not going to teach virtualization here, though it is a topic for another time. The fact that an IT infrastructure needed to be dynamic and the server performance varieties needed are full filled by Virtualization are some of  the reasons it is a major player in this game.

For an example,

A web-based company would have a high traffic by users on weekdays and during the weekend the access traffic could be low.  So during the weekend the web servers run idle. All the resources CPU, RAM Disks run for no reason.
However, virtualization enables to have multiple servers, (virtual Machines) run on the same physical server. So when the web server goes to idle, its resources are used by another server sitting on the same physical server for its work. It is possible because the web server actually did not have a physical CPU or RAM or NIC or any hardware but a virtual representation of them.

So going cloud really means,

A company would go to a cloud provider like Microsoft Azure and hand over their systems to them. The company will no longer need to have any physical server with them. They just need to simply connect to their system hosted in Microsoft data center through a secure network like VPN.

There are couple of ways to do this. In fact, Microsoft will provide three possibilities.

Azure Web Sites

Azure Virtual Machines

Azure Cloud Services

In each category, it varies the things a company/you have to worry about and things Microsoft will take care of for you.  It is in very simple terms as bellow,

Azure web sites – The web site is hosted in a shared VM or multiple VMs and Microsoft will take care of the VMs. No access to the VM
Azure Cloud Service – You have access to the VM and some of its functions. Microsoft will take care the VM/s for you.

Azure VM- You have full access to the VM and you are responsible for what happens in it. Microsoft will however help you to take care of the VM with various services and monitoring.

As a serviec model (anything as a service)

Even though those are Microsoft classifications in general those falls into As a service or XaaS model.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) to storage-as-a-service
Desktop-as-a-service (DaaS)
Disaster recovery-as-a-service(DRaaS)
Network-as-a-service (NaaS)
Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS)
Platform-as-a-service (PaaS)

PaaS (Platform as a Service) is the most common service out there and there are tons of Paas providers out there. Those companies will maintain a big data center and maintain their customer`s systems separated by virtual networks.

Feel free to send me the questions if you got any