In this article, we will try to see the concepts of Cloud, IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and PaaS (Platform as a Service). Cloud computing has been part of the internet service delivery landscape for over a decade or even earlier. It is now very evident that the individuals who don’t do much of the coding or relate to the IT industry understand “the Cloud” thus mentioning the extent it has expanded. Along with it, there is a craze that has been started to understand DevOps and also to bring in the good stuff within an Organization and further within the industry.
Though the choice of choosing a Cloud environment is pretty straight-forward but choosing between an IaaS and in a PaaS service is quite difficult as each has their own requirements for the in-house expertise and also in customization and life-cycle management. With IaaS, the decision to bring in a big package of infrastructure services which includes network, server, storage and development tools has to be made. With such a situation, the question arises – does the team have the skills and does the team have the time to build this. Building your own IaaS development platform doesn’t just end up at the creation stage but also requires regular maintenance timeframes from the DevOps teams.
This doesn’t have to be for sure that PaaS (Platform as a Service) is not customizable. The key here is that it is a packaged and integrated one-stop toolkit. The need for the speed demands PaaS to be chosen over IaaS as PaaS comes with an automated development, deployment, provisioning, security and other application lifecycle management tools. The case with the PaaS user would be that the tool itself gets updates from its provider, hence relieving the teams of any further maintenance timeframes spent on them in totality. When deciding between IaaS and PaaS, you along with your Organization needs to take a calculated decision or else you might end up with a tool that doesn’t cater to all of your requirements.
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Having discussed the various concepts of Cloud, Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service – we now will take a look at various tools that fit into the DevOps chain of tools. Let us now take a look at each of these tools and also the advantages that these bring to the table when introduced into your Organization’s DevOps toolchain.
DigitalOcean is a private Virtual Cloud space provider, based out of New York City. It is designed to simplify the web infrastructure for developers and each of these plans is affordable and feature-rich. DigitalOcean thrives to be a simple cloud hosting service provider where the configurations are pretty straightforward. As mentioned, it doesn’t come up with the high-end offering as like Load Balancing, Hosted databases, Hadoop Clusters as provided by many other service providers in the same business. Having said that, the low-priced products and at the same time, the high-performance virtual machines still make this a good choice for your business growth.
Following are some of the advantages of using Digital Ocean, let us now take a look at each and every one of them:
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Microsoft Azure is an offering from Microsoft, which is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure that is created for the purpose of building, deploying and also managing applications and services. It is also an integrated suite of tools and templates that are intended to put to use to improve the productivity of any IT professional. It provides a massive set of features and functionalities that can be leveraged by the professional to build/manage an enterprise, mobile, web and internet of things (IoT) applications. It is an ideal application that suites businesses which have standardized Windows and Linux users. The compatibility that it provides with the Linux accentuates virtual infrastructure guest operating systems as well as Linux based container architecture (Docker).
While the Microsoft Azure application itself is designed and deployed on top of Hyper-V framework, you can run different Linux distributions (such as CentOS, OpenSUSE, SUSE, Ubuntu) and along with it the Windows Server 2008 and 2012. There are massive investments going on into Microsoft Azure’s public cloud offerings and the efforts to those are definitely paying off with the Infrastructure as a Service field of DevOps. It is now competing for head-on with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. One of the best advantages that makes it a fit for the current situation is that the compatibility that it shows with Windows, Linux and containerization as well.
Following are some of the advantages of using Microsoft Azure, let us now take a look at each and every one of them:
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Virtustream's xStream product is created to be the only option for a SaaS Cloud management platform. It’s sole purpose for creation was the aim to deliver economic and business benefits for your entire portfolio of applications, be it mission-critical environments (for the likes of SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and etc.) or others. Irrespective of the stream of business that you belong, xStream lets you move your thing to Cloud, automate it, optimize it and outperform than your traditional operations.
xStream provides network and storage I/O in the same ways and means as like the Cloud service providers – ensuring that your processes are never I/O starved irrespective of the transaction load or storage read/write volume. Enterprise IT can now run their existing applications (including the Production like environments of SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and several others) on the cloud with fixed SLAs without even having to bother about just the simple infrastructure availability.
Following are some of the advantages of using Virtusteam xStream, let us now take a look at each and every one of them:
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IBM provides its Platform as a Service is a fool-proof, secure, collaborative cloud-based environment which supports a complete lifecycle of accelerated application development and delivery. IBM uses a PaaS service rather than Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model as like Amazon’s AWS. The biggest difference here with the other IaaS providers is that you would be ending up configuring the infrastructure with the virtual counterparts (such as hardware specifications, processor type, memory, hard drive, network connects and etc.) whereas PaaS environments have you set up the platform on which you intend to run your software program, such as the programming environments, databases, clustering so on and so forth – which means that you are ready to develop or operate your software out of the box.
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Following are some of the advantages of using IBM Cloud, let us now take a look at each and every one of them:
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EPAM Cloud Orchestrator is an offering from the existing EPAM ecosystem which enables project teams to manage their virtual infrastructure using a self-service solution. Few key characteristics that highlight EPAM Orchestration service are its multitenancy which allows users to work on projects independently without interfering with any other’s work. Multitenancy in layman terms can be explained as organizations being referred to as tenants and each tenant is represented by a project in EPAM Cloud. The limitations imposed are reduced to such an extent that Cloud management is made an easy for projects – creating their own infrastructure, customizing it according to the customer’s needs and requirements.
Having said that, EPAM Orchestrator also allows scheduling of the instance manipulation just so that its state is changed automatically – further providing options to optimize the infrastructure and thereby the costs as well. The schedules are set up with cron expressions so that they are specified according to rules. EPAM Orchestrator provides users with a set of monitoring tools allowing them to get information on various aspects of service performances as like:
Following are some of the advantages of using EPAM Orchestrator, let us now take a look at each and every one of them:
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Pivotal Cloud Foundry is the industry’s open source Platform as a Service (PaaS) service which enables Organizations to deploy and scale applications within seconds. All of this can be achieved without locking yourself to a single cloud provider. It is an open source cloud computing platform that was developed in-house at VMWare which is now owned by a conglomerate (EMC, VMWare, GE). Cloud Foundry lightens the burden over a developer as it manages so much on the application’s resource management – it greatly reduces the overhead burden on your operations team as well.
Cloud Foundry is optimized to deliver in a lot of aspects of Cloud environments for development teams, which are listed down as below:
Following are some of the advantages of using Pivotal Cloud Foundry, let us now take a look at each and every one of them:
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Alibaba Cloud is a subsidiary of Alibaba Group and also is a global cloud computing company headquartered in Hangzhou. Alibaba Cloud is a provider of a varied suite of cloud computing services which covers aspects like elastic computing, object storage, relational database, big data analysis, and artificial intelligence. Alibaba Cloud began as a private cloud provider to serve the internal demands of Alibaba's e-commerce businesses and then spread its wing to cater to other needs. Alibaba Cloud is the biggest and the largest cloud computing company in China with data centers across mainland China. Alibaba Cloud also operates in eight geographical regions around the globe, with two new data center locations expected to launch.
Following are some of the advantages of using Alibaba Cloud, let us now take a look at each and every one of them:
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Cisco’s CloudCenter is an application-centric hybrid cloud management platform which securely provisions infrastructure resources and has the ability to deploy applications across various data centers, private cloud and public cloud environments without any issues. It comes with a promise that it improves the IT speed and agility, ensures work optimization for users – thus enabling them to quickly model, deploy and also manage applications on any given environments. Having said that, it also ensures and delivers IT control to the administrators, as they would gain visibility and governance across boundaries of applications, environments, and users.
Cisco CloudCenter is the single platform solution with the hybrid cloud technology which ensures to abstract the application from the underlying cloud environment. A hybrid IT strategy is always successful with a flexible mix of IT service options across data center, private and public cloud environments. A need of the hour in the IT industry is to reduce the existing complexity and strategically able to manage financial, operational and security risks which popup from managing multiple applications scattered around various environments and are accessed by various sets of users.
Following are some of the advantages of using Cisco CloudCenter, let us now take a look at each and every one of them:
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Google’s Firebase provides us the best possible platform to build portable and customizable business applications and there is no other option that fits this requirement any better than Firebase itself. To be very precise, it is a must-have for the business application development and also at the same time for the real-time database integration as well. Doing so, any user update on the database is propagated to the other users as notifications automatically. Backed by Google’s innovative features, Firebase ensures application configuration be automated completely. Having said that, every business venture tries its best to expand their follower base and also want to increase their profits levels – which is best done by Google’s Firebase!
Following are some of the advantages of using Google Firebase, let us now take a look at each and every one of them:
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Jelastic has the ability to provide an entire enterprise stack that can be installed on any server that has nothing pre-installed on it or any existing IaaS solution in hours. Most of these cloud IT resources can further be managed by administrators using a single management console. Jelastic is definitely one of the most favorite PaaS tool that helps developers to totally forget about the server or cloud configuration and to focus only on development tasks itself. Based on the usage and also if you want to scale your application horizontally or vertically, your payment varies as per your usage only.
Following are some of the advantages of using Jelastic, let us now take a look at each and every one of them:
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In this article, we have introduced to the concepts of Cloud, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS), how these concepts fit in the DevOps world. We have also gone through tools and also their advantages when put to use in the DevOps chain of tools. Hope you get all the information that you seek for here and also at the same time, kindly provide your feedback so that we can work towards the betterment of the future articles.
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