- Cloud computing can drive digital transformation of entire industries and economies
- Infrastructure As A Service (IAAS) has emerged as a powerful tool in the growth and adoption of the cloud
Cloud computing is an intelligent engine that drives the digital transformation and upgrading of all walks of life and shapes the future economic form.The cloud services provided by cloud computing vendors have core capabilities such as computing resource virtualization, distributed massive data storage, and cloud platform management.
Cloud services can be grouped into three broad categories:
- laaS: Infrastructure as a service
- PaaS: Platform as a service
- SaaS: Software as a service
Can say, no reliable IaaS, there is no cloud services.
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laaS users need to manage and set up most of the infrastructure, from the operating system to the specification of virtual machine computing resources need to be controlled, set the required conditions to obtain resources.
As an example, if you use IaaS, instead of buying hardware, you rent IT infrastructure servers and virtual machines (VMS), storage, networking, and operating systems from Microsoft on a pay-as-you-go basis, and are responsible for managing the operating system, data, and applications. IaaS pools physical server resources and combines computing virtualization, network virtualization, and storage virtualization technologies to deliver and compute resources to end users.
Albert Barron, a software architect at IBM, once used the analogy of pizza to explain the problem. David Ng further generated electricity to make it more accurate and understandable.
Be a pizzeria owner
Now, imagine that you are a restaurateur who wants to start a pizza business. You could make the pizza yourself, from start to finish, but it’s a lot of work and requires a lot of preparation, so you decide to outsource some of the work and use someone else’s service. You have three options:
Plan 1: laaS–Someone else provides the kitchen, the stove, the gas, and you use that infrastructure to bake your pizza.
Plan 2: PaaS–In addition to infrastructure, they also provide pizza crust. All you have to do is sprinkle your ingredients on the crust and let him bake it out for you. In other words, all you have to do is design the flavor of the pizza (seafood pizza or chicken pizza), and others provide a platform service for you to implement your design.
Plan 3: Saas–Someone else makes a pizza, and you get a finished product without your intervention. All you have to do is sell it, or at most wrap it up and put your own Logo on it.
Let’s make a summary:
Corresponding to the field of Internet, we can easily understand this concept.
Pop quiz
After learning how to make pizza, you can tell me that you want to open a pizza shop (you are a cloud service user), which model is more comfortable?
A. IaaS
B. PaaS
C. SaaS
The answer is at the bottom of this article.
The function of IaaS
Test and development
Teams can quickly set up and dismantle test and development environments to bring new applications to market faster. IaaS can quickly scale up and down the development test environment.
Web hosting
Running a website using IaaS can be cheaper than traditional web hosting.
Storage, backup, and recovery
Avoids the capital expenditure of storage and complex storage management. IaaS is useful for handling unpredictable demands and steadily growing storage requirements. It also simplifies the planning and management of backup and recovery systems.
High performance computing
High performance computing (HPC) on supercomputers, computer grids, or computer clusters helps solve complex problems involving millions of variables or calculations. Examples include earthquake and protein folding simulations, climate and weather forecasting, financial modeling, and evaluating product design.
Big data analysis
It contains potentially valuable patterns, trends, and associations. Mining data sets to locate or tease out these hidden patterns requires tremendous processing power, which IaaS provides cost-effectively.
An excellent IaaS
The ultimate purpose of IaaS services is to provide users with computing, storage, network and other resources on demand, and to provide applications such as operating systems and databases, so as to provide stable and reliable infrastructure support for users’ services and applications.
To achieve this goal, IaaS service providers need to have a strong strength in at least three areas: reliability and performance, full stack capability, and enterprise services.
Reliability and Performance
If you look at the cloud services that most people are using today, whether it’s infrastructure or software, it’s uptime and a consistent user experience that are key to customer adoption.The operating system, database and other general application systems are usually the mainstream choice, and there is no obvious difference between each platform. Therefore, the key to reliability and performance, in fact, lies in the cloud providers in the computing, storage, network and other infrastructure level and the competition of software and hardware collaboration capabilities.If we want to have strong strength in computing, storage, network, software and hardware coordination at the same time, we not only need to have the ability to understand the whole process of cloud, management and end, but also need to have a deep understanding and long-term solid technical precipitation and accumulation in the field of computing, storage and network, which is not an overnight success.
Full stack capability
With the rise of Internet, mobile, big data, Internet of Things and AI technologies, traditional industries are facing the challenge of digital transformation, which requires a more comprehensive, flexible and long-term evolvable full-stack cloud platform, which can provide powerful support for enterprise digital transformation from all levels of chip, hardware, software, solution and so on, to help enterprise customers realize business value.
To have full stack capability, IaaS service providers are required not only to have the underlying capability, but also to have the upper platform capability, but also to have the complete integration capability from chip to hardware to software, and then to the application, including a deep understanding of the business of various industries, so as to provide users with real full stack capability.
Enterprise service
Enterprise service capability is a key option for IaaS services that is often overlooked.All kinds of cloud products, including IaaS, are very different from other traditional products. The essence of selling is service rather than a single real product. It is not a one-time sale process, but a long-term service process. Therefore, there are certain requirements for users to provide technical support and service capabilities on cloud services, especially for enterprise users, the requirements for such technical support and service capabilities are higher.
In fact, it can be said that there are few cloud providers that can have a strong strength in all three aspects at the same time, and Huawei Cloud is one of them.
The correct answer to the pop quiz is C. SaaS
