Four Deployment Models of Cloud

Most people assume that 'cloud' means public cloud providers such as AWS, Azure and GCP.

Although 'Public cloud' is the most common deployment model, it's not the only one.

The four deployment models of cloud computing are:

Private Cloud

The cloud infrastructure is provisioned for exclusive use by a single organization comprising multiple consumers (e.g., business units). It may be owned, managed, and operated by the organization, a third party, or some combination of them, and it may exist on or off premises.

Private clouds are generally only used by large enterprises or government organizations.

Although the cloud is private, it may be owned by a third party.

• For example, AWS provides private cloud services for the American DoD.

Private clouds may be on or off premises.

• Many people assume that 'cloud' and 'on-prem' are two different things, but that is not always the case.

The same kinds of services offered are the same as in public clouds (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS), but the infrastructure is reserved for a single organization.

Community Cloud

The cloud infrastructure is provisioned for exclusive use by a specific community of consumers from organizations that have shared concerns (e.g., mission, security requirements, policy, and compliance considerations). It may be owned, managed, and operated by one or more of the organizations in the community, a third party, or some combination of them, and it may exist on or off premises.

This is the least common cloud deployment.

Similar to private cloud, but the infrastructure is reserved for use by only a specific group of organizations.

Public Cloud

The cloud infrastructure is provisioned for open use by the general public. It may be owned, managed, and operated by a business, academic, or government organization, or some combination of them. It exists on the premises of the cloud provider.

This is the most common cloud deployment.

Popular public cloud service providers include:

• AWS (Amazon Web Services).

• Microsoft Azure

• GCP (Google Cloud Platform)

• OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure)

• IBM Cloud

• Alibaba Cloud

Hybrid Cloud

The cloud infrastruture is a composition of two or more distinct cloud infrastructures (private, community, or public) that remain unique entities, but are bound together by standardized or proprietary technology that enables data and application portability (e.g., cloud bursting for load balancing between clouds).

This is basically any combination of the previous three deployment types.

for example, a private cloud which can offload to a public cloud when necessary.