ServiceMesh

At the root of IT services and capabilities is infrastructure. The root of Agile IT is agile infrastructure that you can access when required, but that you don’t own. At this point, most people immediately think of “cloud computing,” and while that industry term describes the basics, there are many types of cloud and cloud architectures.

Pre-production Cloud: Clouds make an ideal way to rapidly provision resources on-demand for developers and test teams. Because these applications aren’t yet in production, the resources are only required periodically. Development workloads, for instance, may be started and stopped multiple times per hour to test new capabilities or bug fixes as code is checked into a pre-production application. Given this usage pattern, it can be far more cost effective if resources are only paid for as they are needed. There is little downside in “turning off” a development or test resource, much like a light switch, when it is not needed overnight, provided the instance is rapidly provisioned in minutes when required the next day.

Private Cloud: Once an application goes into production, the question is where should it go? While many people think of “cloud computing” as being something like the public cloud provided by Amazon EC2, there are many categories of cloud computing. Enterprises can also build their own clouds, either in their own physical data centers, or possibly as a “virtual private cloud” in a service provider data center. Private clouds and virtual private clouds deliver increased levels of security for specific applications that may be unsuitable for running in publicly accessible clouds.

Hybrid Cloud:Today, applications are not monolithic pieces of code that reside in a single operating system process. Rather, distributed, multi-tier applications are becoming the norm. These applications are spread across multiple physical servers, with various types of processing occurring on different machines. Hybrid cloud architectures make it possible to send workloads to public clouds while other workloads requiring greater security remain in a private or virtual private cloud. This idea of “right placement” of a set of workloads, even multiple workloads belonging to the same application, naturally results in a hybrid cloud system.

For more information about different types of clouds, see Clearing the Fog: Internal vs. External vs. Public vs. Private Clouds..