Study Topic: Cloud Computing
This is a Study Leave topic.
What Is It?
Computing resources
Why Study It?
Easier to provision instances as needed
Toggl code
Toggl code is TECH-CLOUD
Deliverables
3 hours to first checkpoint. Get accounts up and initial impressions
- AWS - the first of the public clouds
- Google Cloud Computing
- Microsoft Azure
Have Microsoft Remote Desktop Client
WriteUp
Models
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
- complete control of the OS and the application platform stack to the application developers and IT Professional which is analogous to Hyper-V and other virtualization platforms
- unit of deployment is at the granularity of a virtual machine
- Platform as a Service (PaaS)
- compute service that provisions computing resources in terms of CPU, memory and volatile disk storage through resource descriptors provided at the deployment time
- unit of deployment in PaaS is an application package and its associated data
- Software as a Service (SaaS)
- SaaS uses the web to deliver applications that are managed by a third-party vendor and whose interface is accessed on the clients’ side.
- Most SaaS applications can be run directly from a web browser without any downloads or installations required, although some require plugins.
- Because of the web delivery model, SaaS eliminates the need to install and run applications on individual computers
Comparing Providers
See here for a detailed test of the big 3 as of 26Feb2014: Ultimate cloud speed tests: Amazon vs. Google vs. Windows Azure with takeaways:
- The options are complex: processors, memory, disk space - and not directly comparable between the major vendors.
- The economics don't work out unless your calculation needs are "bursty" so you don't want your machines gathering dust most of the time
- Benchmarking is tricky because you're on VMs that may have contention, see here for more on this: (01May2013: Benchmarking Amazon EC2: The wacky world of cloud performance)
- The only way to be sure you're getting performance you expect on machine X vs machine Y is to run the computations
- Speed: Google > AWS > Azure (so Google fastest)
- Cost: AWS > Google, Azure (so AWS most expensive)
Gartner May 2015: For big businesses, AWS are most mature, biggest, with Azure now a major contender both in terms of integration with on-premises management tools and cloud size: Google best of the rest. Azure have had outages and are possibly better as a backup compute resource than something mission critical.
AWS
AWS Free Tier includes 750 hours of usage each month for one year of the new T2 instance type. To stay within Free Tier, use only micro instances.
Signed up as user matt_morris_zz@yahoo.co.uk with normal password for Amazon
If you interact with AWS programmatically using the SDKs, Command Line Interface (CLI), or APIs, you must provide access keys to verify who you are and whether you have permission to access the resources you're requesting. To manage your account's access keys, go to https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/home?#security_credential .
Documentation, sample code, articles, tutorials, and more can be found in the AWS Resource Center at http://aws.amazon.com/resources/ .
For help and support, visit the AWS Support Center at https://aws.amazon.com/support .
Usage will be billed to your account on a monthly basis. You can manage your account and review your account activity online at https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/home.
Management console: https://eu-west-1.console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/v2/home?region=eu-west-1#
Marketplace: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace