Demystifying the cloud - Part 4: Understanding CI/CD, IoT, Mobile and Enterprise services

This is part of a group of posts that aims to demystify the cloud for non-cloud experts and provide a framework in which to think about the services cloud can provide. In essence, to make cloud simple.

It follows the premise that all the cloud providers have essentially the same types of core services, with various strengths and benefits.  As we progress to a situation where most organisations use multiple clouds for different purposes, it is useful to understand the higher concepts and how they relate to each other.  Only then can you go down to the next level and understand what makes one cloud different to another, and why you might use one cloud provider for one use case and another cloud for a different one.

To recap, in the first post of the series, we talked about the high level service categories which can be broken down into: 

Core Services	Data & Analytics	Enterprise
Compute Networking Storage Security	Data Integration Databases ML/Artificial Intelligence Analytics	Hybrid Connectivity Integration Workflow Search Management
Migration	Development	Mobile & IoT
Application Discovery Application Migration Data Migration	Developer Tools DevOps Pipelines	Mobile IoT
Global Infrastructure (Regions, Availability Zones)

In this post, let’s go down to the next level and understand the service types that fit into the Mobile, IoT, Enterprise and CI/CD categories.  

CI/CD Tools

Becoming more and more popular is the concept of DevOps in order to increase the speed from build to deployment to production. The core services are:

It all begins with a source repository were a developer can check in their code. While GitHub is the most well known source code repository in the industry it also comes with a cost. The cloud providers have also created their own versions which are mostly free which provides a good option where only one cloud provider is chosen.

In a Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment lifecycle, the check-in of the code kicks of the next process where a build server grabs the code and builds a package based on the dependencies defined. Once the package is built, it gets checked into a package repository ready for the next stage.

A deployment server then takes the pre-built package and deploys it to the next environment such as the test environment. The process then performs either automated or manual tests and once all those are passed, it gets promoted to the next environment.  

The cloud providers can also provide the next level of abstraction and manage the whole process for you for certain types of frameworks. Eg. AWS has elastic beanstalk that makes it easy to develop and then promote code as well as deploy and back-out.

IoT

Another group of services that are changing our lives for the better are the Internet of Things (IoT) services. The core services are:

The IoT services can be broken into 2 groups. The first are the API’s that live either on or close to the actual device in the field. Not only do these APIs help manage the communication back to the cloud it also allows some processing to occur almost in real time on/or near the device. This saves the latency and energy required to always go back to a central service.

The 2nd group is the hub that manages the device information and data ingestion as a whole back on the cloud platform. These services help manage device patch upgrades, data processing, alerting and the ability to provide the information to GIS tools or analytics tools to represent the state of the device and to help with operations. They can even provide alerts to service teams in the field if issues occur. 

Mobile

We have only listed one core service here although the space of course could be a lot more complicated. These services make it easy to create, configure, and implement scalable mobile and web apps. The core service type is:

Enterprise

The final set of services in this post revolves around services a typical organisation user would use on a day to day basis. The core services are:

The first is enterprise document storage and sharing. This goes towards replacing the shared document locations on the typical LAN. It comes with the standard security policies around who can access what.

A service that we haven’t seen much traction within organisations but sounds good in theory is the use of a desktop computing service. These are virtual desktops that contain all of the users registered applications. This means all the user needs is any browser and a set of credentials. All the computing power is done in the cloud. It means central policies are more easily controlled but we tend to think people like having their own hardware - at least in the short term.

The final service listed here is cloud search where a user can search for data across all the defined services in an organisations cloud which is becoming more relevant as the space grows. Often this is combined with a metadata repository as well.

Summary

In this post, we have dug a little deeper and explained the different types of Mobile, IoT, Enterprise and CI/CD services you will find across most cloud providers.  

As mentioned previously, while understanding conceptually what type of services a cloud provider has, the true magic happens when you start integrating them into patterns for devops, microservices, and data & analytics.  We will cover these patterns in later posts.

For access to the full reference list, download our free resource here.

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.