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Module 1 - Introduction to the Cloud

Module 1 - Introduction to the Cloud

What Is Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources with pay-as-you-go pricing. Rather than purchasing and maintaining physical hardware, you access computing power, storage, and databases over the internet from a provider such as AWS.

Deployment Types

  • Cloud — All resources are hosted and managed by the cloud provider.
  • On-premises — All resources are hosted and managed within your own data centre.
  • Hybrid — A combination of cloud and on-premises resources, allowing you to keep sensitive workloads local whilst offloading others to the cloud.

Benefits of AWS Cloud

  • Pay-as-you-go pricing — you only pay for what you use.
  • Benefit from economies of scale, which lowers costs compared to managing your own infrastructure.
  • Dynamically scale resources to meet demand, both up and down.
  • Increase speed and agility by provisioning new resources in minutes.
  • Remove the need to run and maintain a physical data centre.
  • Get to market faster by reducing the time required to set up new environments.

AWS Regions

Regions are geographic locations around the world that contain groups of data centres. These groups are called Availability Zones. Each region contains a minimum of three Availability Zones, which provides redundancy and fault tolerance within that region.

AWS Availability Zones

An Availability Zone consists of one or more data centres with redundant power, networking, and connectivity. Each zone is physically isolated from the others within the same region.

Because Availability Zones are isolated, you can distribute resources across multiple zones. If one zone experiences an outage, your application continues to run in the remaining zones.

For example, if you place two virtual machines behind a load balancer, putting each VM in a different Availability Zone ensures that a single zone failure does not take your application offline.

The AWS Shared Responsibility Model

Both the customer and AWS share responsibility for securing the application. The division of duties is as follows:

Customer responsibility:

  • Customer data
  • Client-side data encryption

Shared responsibility (AWS and customer):

  • Server-side data encryption
  • Network traffic protection
  • Platform, applications, identity, and access management
  • Operating system, network, and firewall configuration

AWS responsibility:

  • Compute, storage, database, and network updates
  • Physical hardware and global infrastructure

Cloud in Real Life

  • Place your resources in regions close to your customers to reduce latency.
  • Move faster and spend less by leveraging cloud infrastructure rather than building your own.
  • Achieve higher availability by spreading workloads across multiple Availability Zones.