By Danish Ali Siddiqui-
The cloud may seem a nebulous concept, but it’s a place where a huge and increasing amount of IT takes place. And it has been a boon for start-ups.
“The cloud” may be a nebulous thing, a concept rather than a piece of hardware. The term broadly refers to data and services that are accessed via the internet and hosted on shared hardware in a third-party data centre. Companies that offer these services are called “cloud providers.”
“Cloud infrastructure” is how you build your systems and applications in the cloud. It encompasses all of the underlying tools and services that your applications and workloads run on top of. At its most basic, cloud infrastructure mimics the familiar components of conventional IT systems: servers (referred to as “compute resources” in cloud parlance), storage, databases, and networking components. But as cloud providers have matured, they’ve also developed tools and concepts specific to the cloud.
In the enlightened 2020s, we may wonder why small companies back then would want to own a bunch of expensive, soon-to-be outdated computing and networking hardware. They usually didn’t. But at the time, there weren’t many alternatives. If you wanted email, file sharing, databases, and all the benefits of modern software systems, you needed physical infrastructure to power it. That pretty much meant buying and operating the components yourself.
Buying equipment took time and money; setup and operation of the equipment required dedicated staff or contractors or both; and security and maintenance of the equipment necessitated many other expenses (like industrial air conditioning, power, locks, fire suppression, alarms, etc.). This meant that companies were investing significant amounts of capital and effort to build internal capabilities for something that had little to do with their core business models.
Virtualization and the birth of the cloud
It used to be that “infrastructure” meant “on-prem” infrastructure. But in the aughts, virtualization technology matured rapidly, paving the way for the modern commercial cloud.
A typical computer hosts a single operating system, and the available CPU (central processing unit), RAM (random-access memory), storage, and networking capacity all map directly to the physical properties of the hardware. If you want more disk space for your on-prem infrastructure, you need to install more or bigger hard disks. If you want more CPU power, you need to upgrade the physical processors. Virtualization changes that paradigm, allowing multiple operating systems to run on a single hardware host and to share their physical resources. In this scenario, resources are divided among guest operating systems. One guest operating system may be assigned, say, 20% of the hardware’s available CPU, while another guest receives 80%. This allocation can be changed at any time by updating a setting in the virtualization software. In some cases, the total combined resources assigned to the hosts can even exceed the actual physical resources of the hardware.
In 2000, Amazon began to break its monolithic applications into decentralized services. To help Amazon engineers build services more quickly and cheaply, the company used virtualization to create flexible and efficient computing environments, running on shared commodity hardware. Amazon soon realized that other companies may be willing to pay for these virtualized infrastructures, and in 2006 it began offering “cloud” computing as a service under the name Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Moving infrastructure to the cloud
In the early days of the public cloud, providers focused on three core services: computing (i.e., virtual servers), databases, and storage. But before long, customers wanted to move more of their IT infrastructure to the cloud or to have entirely cloud-native systems. Networking, queues, caches, logging, monitoring, DNS — a wide variety of components go into building an IT system, and cloud providers rushed to offer them all as services. Most anything possible on-prem can now be created with cloud-native services.
But cloud providers have gone beyond just mimicking on-prem concepts with virtualization — they now offer services that abstract some common functionality even further, blurring the boundaries between infrastructure, software, and services. Secrets, for example, is the AWS secrets-management service. You can use it to store and retrieve sensitive information, like credentials and access tokens, but you never have to think about the hardware or the software that it runs on. It’s a pure service: You just expect it to do whatever it promises. But you may still think of it as a component of your cloud infrastructure. More and more cloud infrastructure components are being built this way: not just as hardware or software in someone else’s data centre, but as completely self-contained and abstract services. And as these services mature and become more provider-specific, the definition of “cloud infrastructure” grows increasingly nuanced.
Who uses cloud infrastructure and why?
There are a lot of good reasons to build systems using cloud infrastructure:
Cost Savings: If you are worried about the price tag that would come with making the switch to cloud computing, you aren't alone 20% of organizations are concerned about the initial cost of implementing a cloud-based server. But those who are attempting to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of using the cloud need to consider more factors than just the initial price they need to consider ROI.
Once you're on the cloud, easy access to your company's data will save time and money for project start-ups. And, for those who are worried that they'll end up paying for features that they neither need nor want, most cloud-computing services are pay-as-you-go. This means that if you don't take advantage of what the cloud has to offer, then at least you won't have to be dropping money on it.Security: Many organizations have security concerns when it comes to adopting a cloud-computing solution. After all, when files, programs, and other data aren't kept securely on-site, how can you know that they are being protected? If you can remotely access your data, then what's stopping a cybercriminal from doing the same thing? Well, quite a bit.
For one thing, a cloud host's full-time job is to carefully monitor security, which is significantly more efficient than a conventional in-house system, where an organization must divide its efforts between a myriad of IT concerns, with security being only one of them. And while most businesses don't like to openly consider the possibility of internal data theft, the truth is that a staggeringly high percentage of data thefts occur internally and are perpetrated by employees. When this is the case, it can be much safer to keep sensitive information offsite. Of course, this is all very abstract let’s consider some solid statistics.
Rapid Scale claims that 94% of businesses saw an improvement in security after switching to the cloud.
Flexibility: Your business has only a finite amount of focus to divide between all of its responsibilities. If your current IT solutions are forcing you to commit too much of your attention to computer and data-storage issues, then you aren't going to be able to concentrate on reaching business goals and satisfying customers. On the other hand, by relying on an outside organization to take care of all IT hosting and infrastructure, you'll have more time to devote to the aspects of your business that directly affect your bottom line.
Mobility: Cloud computing allows mobile access to corporate data via smartphones and devices, which, considering over 2.6 billion smartphones are being used globally today, is a great way to ensure that no one is ever left out of the loop. Staff with busy schedules, or who live a long way away from the corporate office, can use this feature to keep instantly up to date with clients and co-workers.
Quality Control: There are a few things as detrimental to the success of a business as poor quality and inconsistent reporting. In a cloud-based system, all documents are stored in one place and in a single format. With everyone accessing the same information, you can maintain consistency in data, avoid human error, and have a clear record of any revisions or updates. Conversely, managing information in silos can lead to employees accidentally saving different versions of documents, which leads to confusion and diluted data.
Disaster Recovery: One of the factors that contribute to the success of a business is control. Unfortunately, no matter how in control your organization may be when it comes to its processes, there will always be things that are completely out of your control, and in today's market, even a small amount of unproductive downtime can have a resoundingly negative effect. Downtime in your services leads to lost productivity, revenue, and brand reputation.
These benefits apply to all customers, but they strongly favour start-ups and small businesses. Organizations that don’t have a lot of money, expertise, or time can build systems relatively quickly and cheaply in the cloud. This has been a factor in the explosion of start-ups over the past 15 years. And again, this is not limited to technology companies: All companies require IT infrastructure of some kind. Combined with purely web-based offerings like Google Suite, cloud infrastructure providers have made it much cheaper and simpler for small businesses to build out IT solutions.
Cloud infrastructure providers
There are several cloud infrastructure providers, and the top three players are all outgrowths of larger tech conglomerates.
AWS is the oldest and by far the largest. Exact numbers are hard to come by, but AWS currently holds about a third of the cloud computing market and offers more than 200 discrete products and services. So many services that AWS struggles to come up with decent names for them all. AWS also has the largest geographic reach of the major providers, and it seems the most focused on migrating enterprise data and workloads to the cloud. AWS also offers plenty of tools and incentives to lure you into the cloud.
Microsoft Azure is the second-largest provider, with around a fifth of the market. Azure is focused on integrations with Windows products and services, which is attractive to organizations that already have a heavy investment in Microsoft products like Office 365 and Teams. These tend to be enterprise organizations that value predictability and consistency across their tech stacks. But it’s also possible to run Linux and other open-source tools on the Azure platform. Azure has seen steady growth in recent years, though direct comparisons to AWS are difficult since the two-report growth differently. In any case, Azure is a serious player and will likely continue to gain market share.
A distant third in the space is Google Cloud Provider, with around one-tenth of the market. Google Cloud Provider’s focus, beyond interoperability with other Google products, is to leverage its reputation as a big-data expert and to focus on open-source solutions and Kubernetes infrastructure.
There are many more companies in this market, but they’re all small by comparison. Any new contender would have a long way to catch up in terms of service offerings, global reach, service and support, and brand recognition. That’s a big task. We may see a new cloud infrastructure giant at some point, but the top three seem positioned to dominate the market shortly.