Cloud Services

Traditional IT infrastructure deployments were some combination of the following:

On-Premises

• All servers, network devices, and other infrastructure are located on company property.

• All equipment is purchased and owned by the company using it.

• The company is responsible for the necessary space, power, and cooling.

Colocation

• Data centers that rent out space for customers to put their infrastructure (servers, network devices),

• The data center provides the space, electricity, and cooling.

• The servers, network devices, etc are still the responsibility of the end customer, although they are not located on the customer's premises.

Cloud services provide an alternative that is hugely popular, and is continuing to grow.

Most people associate 'cloud' with public cloud providers such as AWS.

• Although this is the most common used of cloud services, it's not the only one.

The American NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) defined cloud computing in SP (Special Publication) 800-145.

Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models.