Let's Start With Some Basics
Understand the fundamentals of what is a Server, Virtualization, Hypervisor. What are the fundamental components that encompass a Data Center ? This section will then go into the reasons why organizations move to the cloud and the technical benefits of moving to the cloud.
We'll cover the following...
- Servers
- Virtualization
- Hypervisors
- What is a Data Center?
- Reasons To Move To The Cloud
- Benefit from massive economies of scale:
- Stop guessing about capacity:
- Increase speed and agility:
- Stop spending money on running and maintaining data centers:
- Go global in minutes
- Almost zero upfront infrastructure investment:
- Just-in-time Infrastructure:
- More efficient resource utilization:
- Usage-based costing:
- Reduced time to market:
- Technical Benefits of Cloud Computing
The below is a glossary of terms that you need to know. The reason for bringing this right at the start of the course is to help you to understand the fundamental terminologies before proceeding through the course.
Servers
Think of them as computers that are responsible for the storage of data, computation (where your application lives and provides some value), perform some networking functions. Inside a server, you will find a processor, motherboard, RAM, a networking card, a hard disk, and a power supply.
Servers are expensive and they require a lot of power and people to keep them operational. They are normally procured by the IT team and are kept running as long as possible so that the organization gets the maximum return on its investment. The hardware on the servers fail more often than you think and requires maintenance.
Physical servers are great because they can be configured however you want. But, physical servers lead to waste because it is difficult to run multiple applications on the same server. Software conflicts, network routing, and user access all become more complicated when a server is maximally utilized with multiple applications. Hardware virtualization solves some of these problems.
Virtualization
Virtualization emulates a physical server’s hardware in software. A Virtual Machine (VM) can be created on-demand, is entirely programmable in software. Hypervisors increase these benefits because you can run multiple virtual machines (VMs) on a physical server.
Hypervisors
Hypervisors allow applications to be portable because you can move a VM from one physical server to another. One problem with running your own virtualization platform is that VMs still require hardware to run. Companies still need to have all the people and approvals required to run physical servers, but now capacity planning becomes harder because they have to account for VM overhead too.