Take full advantage of the benefits of infrastructure cloud services
A cloud computing infrastructure is a set of hardware and software components, including servers, networking, storage, hypervisors, and management tools that support computing requirements in a cloud-based environment. Usually, infrastructure cloud services disaggregate the functions of underlying hardware and software components.
This allows cloud service providers (CSPs) to host and deliver virtualized resources, such as virtual machines (VMs), network switches, load balancers, and storage clusters, to users via the internet. In this post, we’ll explore the role of infrastructure cloud services within cloud-based environments, how they differ from cloud computing services, and their benefits.
Role of infrastructure cloud services in cloud computing
Cloud computing has evolved quickly into a crucial computational paradigm, allowing companies to access simple and ubiquitous, on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable IT resources via the internet. As companies move quickly on digital transformation journeys, they need a cost-effective IT infrastructure that increases agility while driving business continuity.
Infrastructure cloud services are at the heart of these transformation strategies. You need cloud computing infrastructure services to support key operations in the organization, whether in private, public, or hybrid cloud environments. When deployed, these components enable on-demand access to computing resources, providing organizations with extra benefits, such as greater flexibility, lower cost of ownership, and enhanced scalability.
You can rent cloud infrastructure components from a CSP through an Infrastructure–as–aService (IaaS) model and support extensive and task-specific applications, including web applications, data warehousing and analytics, high-performance computing (HPC), and more.
Components of infrastructure cloud services
Cloud infrastructure has various key components, including hardware, virtualization, storage, and network, that usually operate as back-end elements. Unlike an on-premises IT infrastructure that leverages the same components at a smaller scale, infrastructure cloud services typically operate at a much greater scale in most enterprise datacenters.
Due to the nature of computational requirements, many large CSPs and even hyperscale cloud organizations, like LinkedIn and Facebook, usually form partnerships with vendors to design customized infrastructure components. For example, some infrastructure components can be optimized for power efficiency while others can be enhanced to power computationally intensive workloads like big data and artificial intelligence (AI).
Let’s take a look at some of the infrastructure cloud service components.
Hardware
An infrastructure cloud network consists of various hardware components distributed across different geographical regions. Some of these components include:
- Servers. Most public CSPs, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Azure, allow their servers to be used by customers based on a multi-tenancy architecture, where multiple customers share the same servers’ functionality.
- Storage devices. These include storage arrays and backup devices that users can leverage to store and back up their data.
- Networking equipment. These include switches, routers, firewalls, and load balancers that provide network services in the infrastructure cloud services.
Virtualization
Virtualization is a technique that decouples the IT services and functions from the underlying hardware. It does so by leveraging a hypervisor that sits on top of the underlying hardware and whose role is to abstract the machine’s resources, including the CPU, memory, network, storage, and input/output.
Virtualization enables organizations to run more than one VM—and multiple operating systems (OSs) and applications—on a single physical server. This enables organizations to derive numerous benefits, including greater efficiency, agility, and economies of scale. In cloud computing, the virtualized resources are pooled together, allowing companies to achieve extra benefits, such as self-service access and automated infrastructure scaling.
Storage
Unlike most traditional on-premises IT infrastructures that use shared disk arrays on a storage area network (SAN), cloud infrastructure relies on locally attached storage components that comprise hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs). In this regard, CSPs aggregate these persistent storage systems through a distributed file system (DFS), allowing them to customize the storage cluster for a particular scenario, such as block, object, or big data.
Isolating the storage control and management from the underlying physical storage device via a DFS simplifies scaling. It also allows CSPs to match the storage capacity to users’ workloads by incrementally adding nodes with the requisite capacity and type of local disks. Turning storage into cloud resources allows IT teams to repurpose the hardware and respond to changes without manually provisioning siloed storage servers for each new business initiative.
Network
A typical network consists of physical wires, switches, routers, firewalls, load balancers, and other equipment. Virtual networks, which are built on top of the physical networking
resources, are core components of cloud infrastructure services. They allow IT administrators to achieve pervasive connectivity while simplifying the management of the network.
A typical cloud network configuration may consist of multiple virtual networks, each with varying levels of visibility. The cloud allows IT administrators to deploy and manage the entire virtual network infrastructure programmatically via software while leveraging the physical network to forward the packets.
Infrastructure cloud services vs. SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS
Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) are the three most popular types of cloud computing services. SaaS is a cloud computing framework that enables companies to have on-demand access to cloud-hosted applications.
In a SaaS model, the company pays a subscription fee to an application vendor, allowing its employees to use complete software from within their web browsers, desktops, or mobile applications. The application vendor hosts and manages all the infrastructure required to deliver the applications, including the servers, networking, storage, middleware, source code, and data storage.
PaaS refers to a cloud computing model that allows organizations to have on-demand access to a cloud-hosted platform for developing, deploying, managing, and maintaining applications. The CSP hosts, manages, and maintains all the IT infrastructure and the software required to allow users to access a complete application development, including servers, storage, networking, OSs, middleware, development tools, and runtimes.
Users, in turn, can access the PaaS offering via a graphical user interface (GUI) where IT development and operations (DevOps) teams can collaborate on all aspects pertaining to the application lifecycle development.
IaaS, on the other hand, is a cloud computing model that allows companies on-demand access to cloud-hosted IT infrastructures, such as servers, networking resources, and storage capacity. IT teams can provision, configure, and manage these resources as they would with on-premises IT infrastructure. The main difference is that the CSP hosts and maintains the IT infrastructure components in its own datacenters.
Infrastructure cloud services in three cloud architectures
Cloud computing infrastructure isn’t an exclusive domain of third-party CSPs, such as AWS and Azure. In reality, all three types of cloud computing, including private, public, or hybrid clouds that are used widely as deployment models in most organizations, use the same essential elements of cloud infrastructure to deliver services.
Each deployment model provides varying levels of control, security, and management. For example, in a private cloud environment, users access cloud infrastructure services based on a single tenancy model. In-house IT teams can develop and maintain the private cloud architecture to achieve a high level of control and security for sensitive data.
The public cloud comprises third-party CSPs that leverage the internet to offer cloud resources to subscribers. Unlike private cloud environments that rely on single-tenant architectures, public clouds use multi-tenant frameworks that achieve economies of scale while lowering the cost of computational power and storage capacities for their subscribers.
Hybrid clouds, on the other hand, allow private and public clouds to interact with each in a separate but well-connected system. Companies that handle sensitive data can leverage hybrid clouds to maintain data privacy and security in on-premises datacenters while hosting less sensitive information and applications in the public cloud.
Benefits of cloud infrastructure
Below is a list of some cloud computing benefits that an organization can expect to achieve with cloud infrastructure:
- Reduced IT costs. An organization can minimize the costs associated with purchasing, managing, and maintaining on-premises IT infrastructure. The cloud infrastructure’s pay-as-you-go pricing model allows organizations to pay only for the services consumed, which means there are no wasted resources.
- Enhanced reliability. Cloud infrastructure makes it easy for companies to achieve fault tolerance in their systems. CSPs have redundant availability zones that allow IT systems to achieve high availability and fault tolerance at a scale far greater than what in-house IT infrastructure can realize.
- Improved scalability. Cloud infrastructure can grow or shrink quickly. For example, if the organization experiences a burst in traffic, IT teams can scale the resource consumption upwards quickly to meet the demand. This level of agility provides real competitive advantages to businesses over their rivals.
- Enhanced disaster recovery mechanisms. Cloud infrastructure offers the organization the power to run or restore mission-critical workloads to any location. This enables the organization to get its IT systems back online much faster in the event of a disaster, reducing the manual processes associated with traditional recovery approaches.
- Greater flexibility in IT consumption. Cloud infrastructure allows businesses to select the best technologies in platforms, software, and computing resources. It also allows employees to be more flexible as they can access corporate resources from any geographical location.
- Improved security. Cloud infrastructure offers many advanced security features that guarantee the safety of corporate resources. Features such as role-based access control (RBAC) and access management via federated roles can limit access to sensitive corporate data, ensuring that only authorized employees access the data.
Parallels RAS streamlines your infrastructure cloud services
Cloud computing continues to deliver on its long-touted potential as the most flexible, scalable, cost-effective and enabling enterprise IT architecture. At Parallels®, cloud strategy is a core component of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) because it has proven to be simpler, faster, and more flexible when deploying and managing virtual workloads.
While traditional on-premises Parallels® RAS deployments have long addressed crucial end-user computing (EUC) concerns over the years, the shift to the cloud is becoming increasingly more attractive for organizations. As a turnkey VDI solution offered in a single package, Parallels RAS makes it easier for small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs) and enterprises to implement and manage cloud infrastructure cost-effectively.
Unlike other VDI solutions that are complex to set up and manage, Parallels RAS is easy to deploy and use. It provides a simple and intuitive installation wizard that enables IT teams without any technical virtualization experience to quickly install and get the VDI infrastructure up and running within minutes.
In addition, Parallels RAS also supports the most commonly used public CSPs, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). You can also leverage the platform in multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud deployments.
Most importantly, Parallels RAS provides robust security features, including transport layer security (TLS), multi-factor authentication (MFA), advanced permissions filtering, and Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), among others. These features make Parallels RAS a perfect solution for remote and hybrid workplaces.
Try out Parallels RAS today and see how it streamlines your cloud infrastructure services!
