Welcome to Apis TechTips, a series of short explainer excerpts from real Apis training courses!
The video below gives you a succinct and useful definition of cloud technology and comes from the course Cloud, NFV and SDN in an Hour.
If you enjoyed this Apis TechTip, check out Apis Training’s full course Cloud, NFV and SDN in an Hour. The course provides in-depth knowledge about different ways to implement a cloud execution environment, what NFV and SDN are, and how all three function together.
Learn about topics such as:
- Cloud Introduction
- Virtualization
- Containers
- OpenStack
- Network Functions Virtualization (NFV)
- Software-Defined Networking (SDN)
Read more about Cloud, NFV and SDN here: https://apistraining.com/portfolio/cloud-nfv-and-sdn-in-an-hour/
This TechTip is also part of a whole eBook of tips, all focusing on Cloud technology. We call it an eBook+ since all chapters are both text and video. If you want to read the text, you can do that, and if you want to watch a teacher tell the story, you can choose that.
All the video chapters are excerpts taken directly from our recorded lessons, so if one of them piques your interest, you can easily go to the course and dive deeper into that particular subject.
This particular eBook+ is called “Cloud Chronicles: A Journey into a Virtualized and Software-Defined World“, and you only need to CLICK HERE to request it for immediate download.
Below you can find the transcribed text for this particular TechTip.
What Is Cloud Technology?
What is cloud, really? Well, I’m here to help you. I have a very short explanation for you that you can use when your friends ask you: it’s network access to shared resources. That’s at least the operating definition that we use at Apis. It has several parts in it, and they’re equally important. Network access to shared resources.
This could look like the illustration here. We have an IP network in the middle, and we have resources connected to that network on the right side. And these are not just arbitrarily chosen resources.
These are the three holy-trinity resources of cloud technology, the three Lego bricks that we use over and over again to build cloud services: compute network, and storage. Compute is CPU resources, servers with RAM, and CPUs. Network, which is switches, routers, cables, those kinds of things. And storage, which is hard drives, or cluster storage, which is lots of hard drives.
But we also have users of these resources over on the left. They look like people, and they could be, but they could also be parts of an organization or even different applications using these different resources. Because that’s what they do. The users use the resources, and it’s important to see how the lines sort of go together because that’s to indicate that these resources are shared among the users.
Maybe it’s easiest to visualize this with a hard drive. All these users perceive that they have access to their own hard drives. They can use it, and they don’t see anyone else’s files on their hard drive at any point in time. Still, they are possibly physically using the same piece of equipment, the same hard drive as the other users. And it’s the same thing for CPU power and for network resources.
So it’s important that they share resources, and it’s important that it’s network access. It’s not something running on the tabletop computer of any of these users.
