What is a cloud computing infrastructure?

The cloud computing infrastructure is the software and hardware layer between the internal system and the public cloud. It combines many different tools and solutions and is an important system for successful cloud computing deployment.

As the public cloud changes the structure of the data center and its hardware, this level of cloud computing infrastructure continues to evolve. So far, IT equipment and data center systems have adopted a more cautious approach, with all facilities behind the firewall. Only users' applications and data are internal to the enterprise and inside the firewall, as are their applications.

Cloud computing is somewhat mobile, forcing a change in this approach. Today, businesses need to target external vendors such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or other cloud computing companies. Enterprises need to create secure data flows in their firewalls to securely connect to public clouds and prevent intruders from entering and attacking while maintaining acceptable levels of performance.

Internal cloud VS cloud computing infrastructure

With the development of cloud computing, many enterprises have adopted an internal cloud model, often called a private cloud. These private clouds don't have the same large-scale computing power as Amazon and IBM, but they have the flexibility to launch virtual instances and keep them internal.

The goal of the enterprise is to simplify the combination of private and public clouds, often referred to as hybrid clouds. To help with this process, organizations use technologies such as Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) to provide cloud computing vendors with everything they need to install a turnkey cloud computing environment. This allows companies to transform their traditional local data centers into cloud-based nonsense that can be managed through a single dashboard.

All services are provided through the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model. As a result, everything is virtualized, so it's easy to set up a cloud-based infrastructure for replication, replacement, and shutdown.

Cloud computing infrastructure building block

The components of a cloud computing infrastructure are generally divided into three broad categories: computing, networking, and storage.

• Calculation: Perform basic calculations of the cloud system. This is almost always virtualized, so you can move the instance.

• Network: Usually commercial hardware runs some kind of software-defined networking (SDN) software to manage cloud connections (for more information on the network, see below).

• Storage: Typically a combination of hard disk and flash storage designed to move data back and forth between a public cloud and a private cloud.

Storage is where cloud infrastructure is separated from traditional data center infrastructure. Cloud infrastructure typically uses locally attached storage instead of shared disk arrays on a storage area network. Cloud service providers such as AWS, Azure, and Google charge SSD storage more than hard disk storage charges.

Cloud storage also uses distributed file systems designed for different types of storage schemes, such as objects, big data, or block storage. The type of storage you use depends on the tasks your business needs to handle. Key point: Cloud storage can scale or shrink as needed.

Cloud computing infrastructure is the foundation of any platform and application. Connected devices such as laptops, computers, or servers transfer data in this larger cloud computing system.

The benefits of IaaS

IaaS is the foundation for building a cloud computing infrastructure. The cloud computing infrastructure is the entity and the IaaS is the store. IaaS makes it possible to lease these cloud computing infrastructure components (computing, storage and networking) from public cloud providers over the global Internet.

IaaS has many benefits:

• Cut upfront costs: IaaS eliminates upfront capital expenditures for purchasing server hardware, and these servers can wait weeks to deliver, require more time to install and deploy, and finally configure. Users can log in to the AWS public cloud's control panel and launch virtual instances within 15 minutes.

• Scalable capacity: If the business needs more capacity, it can quickly purchase more capacity, and if it finds that it does not need to allocate more capacity, it can be reduced without paying up the upfront capital expenditure for purchasing new equipment. IaaS follows a usage-based consumption model, and companies can pay for their capacity.

• Discounts: IaaS providers also offer discounts for ongoing use, or if the company makes a large number of upfront purchases. The savings can also be as high as 75%.

The next step in IaaS is Platform as a Service (PaaS), which is built on the same IaaS platform and hardware. But PaaS has been extended to provide more services, such as a complete development environment, including web servers, tools, programming languages, and databases.

Why use a cloud computing infrastructure?

In a traditional IT infrastructure, everything is connected to the server. Enterprise storage data is located on a specific storage array. The application is on a dedicated physical server, and if anything happens, the enterprise's work stops.

In a cloud computing infrastructure, because everything is virtualized, nothing is associated with a particular physical server. This applies to services and applications. Do people think that when logging in to Gmail, they log in to the same physical server each time? No, it could be one of dozens of virtualization servers in Google's data center.

If an enterprise deploys a cloud computing infrastructure model for its internal infrastructure, the same applies to its AWS instances and internal services. By virtualizing storage, compute, and network components, organizations can build from any available service, rather than using it in bulk. For example, an enterprise can launch an application on a virtual server on hardware with low utilization. Alternatively, you can deploy a network connection on a switch with lower traffic.

With a cloud computing infrastructure, the DevOps team can build their applications to programmatically deploy applications. You can tell the application to find a low utilization server or as close as possible to the datastore deployment. In a traditional IT environment, this is not possible.

Large network changes

Network technology has revolutionized the relationship between cloud computing infrastructure and traditional IT. The current standard in WAN communication technology, Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS), is intended for use within data centers. It does not handle high bandwidth applications very well and is easily overloaded. In addition, data is transmitted in an unencrypted manner, which can cause significant problems when transmitted over the public Internet.

SD-WAN is built for the public Internet, allowing businesses to encrypt traffic using VPNs. It uses intelligent routing to manage traffic to avoid bottlenecks, and most SD-WAN vendors have built their own private networks to supplement the public Internet, so there is no need to compete with Netflix traffic.

Because it is built for the public Internet, one of the biggest advantages of SD-WAN is security. SD-WAN provides end-to-end encryption across the entire network, including the global Internet, and all devices and endpoints are fully authenticated due to software-defined security.

Cloud computing infrastructure challenges

Cloud computing infrastructure in the public cloud is not a perfect solution. There may be problems, and usually these problems are serious. Please note that these are specific to public clouds and should not affect any private cloud infrastructure deployed by the enterprise.

Noisy neighbor

The first problem is the problem of noisy neighbors. When you run a virtual instance, the virtual machine runs on the AWS, Azure, IBM, and Google public cloud servers in the data center. The physical server might be a two-socket rack mount with two IntelXeons and a lot of memory. If four cores are allocated on a 28-core Xeon CPU, the other 24 cores will be leased to others, but they will not know their identity.

The result may be an application that affects user performance, whether it's computing, memory, or networking. A common practice for cloud computing users is to launch a bunch of virtual machines, run benchmarks to see the best performance, and shut down virtual machines they don't need.

The solution to this is the so-called bare-metal cloud. In a bare metal environment, the CPU is not virtualized. That 28-core Xeon is all you have. There are no noisy neighbors and no operating system. Bare metal solutions mean that businesses can extract everything from the OS stack.

Bare metal solutions are designed for specific environments where performance is critical, or if you want to access a custom chip. For example, in a virtualized environment, the network chip cannot be accessed. It can be in bare metal, so you can customize the network, such as packet inspection.

delay

Another issue is the delay. Public cloud performance is not consistent, except on nights when usage rates drop dramatically. If a user's application is sensitive to latency issues, there may be costly issues.

One solution is to change the location of the app. The user may be connecting to the data center on the other side. You can request a data center closer to it to reduce latency. Of course, this may cost more, so we must weigh the benefits.

For example, users can connect directly to a cloud provider and AWS as AWS Direct Connect. However, this is a more expensive solution because users are now using the provider's own network.