Cloud Deployment Models

This topic is something that is covered in cloud 101 sessions and it is like the gateway to Cloud computing. Any person whether he is a tester, developer, DevOps, SREs, business analyst or even a newbie should know the difference before even learning specific services in GCP or AWS or Azure etc.

This post is for those who are new to cloud or those who have never heard or are confused what each type of cloud means.

Private Cloud

This type of cloud is specific to and restricted only to a specific organization. You can say this was up until GCP, AWS and all popular ones came to the market, all the organization had their own servers, data centers and other networking infrastructure placed specific to their needs and are maintained and controller by that organization.

Advantage

• Gives greater control over what to be deployed and who should have access to

• Greater security to the application and data in it

Disadvantage

• Regular maintenance of hardware and software updates

• New installation of hardware in need

• Over or under utilized resources most of the time

• Restriction on the application to be globally scalable and available etc.

Public Cloud

This type of cloud is open to any person both individual, small and large enterprise to use their service and pay for only what has been used.

Advantage

• No maintenance cost

• Scale up or scale down resources based on need

• Greater reach of application globally

• No worries on where and how application runs

• Greater productivity and faster delivery of business

Disadvantage

• Very less control over the data and thus brings insecurity in customers mind

• Choice restricted to few options that this cloud service provides

Hybrid Cloud

This type of cloud is a combination of public, private cloud where instead of focusing entire business to be up and running on a single cloud, the business is actually spread across multiple cloud.

Advantage

• Choice to keep data safe on premise private cloud and application on a public cloud

• Gets benefit of both private and public cloud

• More choice and variants on the cloud services provided by different vendors

• Greater flexibility in cost and easy migration to a specific cloud

Disadvantage

• Maintenance and integration becomes difficult as the workload is spread across platforms

Community Cloud

This type of cloud is a combination of similar domain organizations like healthcare, government sector, banking etc as they all share similar models, privacy rules and regulations.

Advantage

• Collaboration brings more ideas on to table

• Sharing similar domain data becomes easy

• More protection to the data

• Better design of the application

Disadvantage

• With data of similar business, restrictions to try out new ares of business is limited

Conclusion

The most popular ones are Hybrid and public as this brings greater flexibility and more opportunities to try out latest tools, technologies and methodologies.