Demystifying the Cloud - Part 1: Overview

As the cloud movement is starting to pick up pace, a lot more organisations and individuals are wanting to really understand what it means to their organisations and to them personally.

Yet, when you start on the journey you are bombarded by hundreds of different services across the various cloud providers.  In order to learn anything, rather than getting bogged down in the details, you really need to start with a strong conceptual framework in which to place these services.

This is analogous to having to do a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle.  You don’t just pick up one piece and try to match it.  You group similar pieces together that are likely to form part of the overall picture.  From there, you drill down and focus on one group at a time, understand how those pieces fit together and then move on.

In this blog post series, we will attempt to start with the big picture and then drill down into each sub section.

This year I took a challenge to cement my overall cloud knowledge with professional level certifications in each of the major cloud providers - AWS, Azure and GCP.  While this is not a requirement, it is a great validation of your overall knowledge and forces you to understand concepts in more detail than you might otherwise learn.  What became pretty clear was that all three providers offer core services with some similarities.  Of course they all have their own variability in the functionality of each service, which each cloud provider will point out, but by in large the core services have affinities that could be used to group into categories.

A recent Sumo Logic report found “A typical enterprise uses 15 AWS services from 150+ available.   The adopted services are compute, storage, database, and network.  Of the ancillary services like tooling and management, few are broadly adopted by enterprises".  This is great news - as you can get started by understanding the few core services well.  You don’t need to understand everything in order to start on the journey.

Let’s now start with the big picture by breaking it down into service categories. These are:

So we have established a model that can represent every cloud offering by breaking it down into 20 service categories.  These are the big pieces that need to be understood.  Some are mandatory in all cloud implementations, such as the core services, but most others are dependent on what you are trying to achieve.

In each category there may be on average 3-4 service types in which each cloud provider has a key offering.  In total, we have accounted for around 70 service types.  For example, the following is the list of compute service types and the services from the three main cloud providers.

Over the next few weeks, we will delve down into each of these service categories and explain in a little more detail what each service type represents, and what its key function is.

See Part 1: Understanding the Core Services

Summary

While we have started to understand conceptually what type of services a cloud provider has, the true magic happens when you start understanding their nuances and integrating them into patterns for DevOps, microservices, and data & analytics.  We will cover these patterns in later posts.

As it will become clear, it should not be a race for organisations to implement the most number of services in the shortest possible time.  Rather, organisations should go through a carefully planned implementation that gets the foundations right.   Foundations like security, project development lifecycles and governance.  These basics are what is going to help drive an organisation’s innovation speed, which is what all organisations so desperately desire in today’s day and age.

If you want more information regarding any of our services to help reduce the complexity of the cloud, please contact us at contact@cloudmill.com.au.