Tuesday, March 10, 2015

How to decipher cloud computing jargon


As IT becomes an integral part of each business function, it’s increasingly important for non-IT professionals to gain a top-level understanding of technical terms, in order to better execute their own responsibilities. If your business is considering moving to the cloud, one of the biggest challenges that you will face is your ability to understand all the terms that cloud vendors and “techies” throw around.
Below are some of the most commonly used cloud terms, starting with Amazon’s most popular Compute, Storage and Database offerings in the Cloud, followed by some other generic, but seemingly confusing terms. For those of us who don’t have a technical background, this list should help to get you started and give you a clearer understanding of cloud computing, so you’ll be ready for your next chat with IT.

 

VPC

VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) is used to logically separate your infrastructure, platform and applications in a secure virtual network that you define. It is your virtual apartment block in the cloud, which houses all of the bits and pieces relevant to your business. This may include personalised applications for your business like sales and inventory management systems, security software, additional EC2 instances, email hosting services and online storage.

 

VPN Connection

A VPN (Virtual Private Network) is the secure connection between a VPC and another network, like a home network, mobile computer/tablet or another office for your business. It does this by connecting your VPC over another network, like the internet, to other devices/networks. It ensures that everything in your VPC is available to all staff or relevant parties, at any time and in a secure manner.

 

Load Balancing

Is a system used to distribute website traffic across multiple instances. Rather than relying on one server, incoming requests are balanced across a range of servers. That way, your business isn’t relying on a single server, improving the performance and ensuring high availability of your site. You can think of it as balancing the weights on a set of scales until they are even, that is, if you only have two servers – most businesses will have more.

 

Auto Scaling

This is a process that configures your compute capacity (like the size, configuration or architecture) up or down, according to the conditions that have been defined. It can launch and terminate instances without manual intervention. Using this process, you can be sure that the number of EC2 instances that are being used will increase seamlessly in high traffic periods such as when your marketing team is running a busy marketing campaign. It will automatically decrease the required capacity again afterwards, ultimately ensuring there is no spend wastage.

 

CDN

A Content Delivery Network or Content Distribution Network is a large network of caching servers that are distributed across different geographies (in the same country or across multiple countries), taking your web content closer to the eyeballs that are digesting it. As the demand for uploading and downloading content to servers is increasing, cloud providers are now making your cloud available from a number of different servers in different locations, so that you and your content consumers experience increased performance and decreased latency.

 

Self-healing

Like the name suggests, a self-healing device or system is one that has the ability to notice that it is not operating correctly and, without the need for human involvement, make the necessary changes to restore normal operating function. These intuitive systems have made IT servicing and maintenance increasingly cost-effective and reduces service downtime for users.

 

Utility Computing/Billing

Cloud uses a pay-per-use model that allows cloud users to pick and choose what technologies, services, infrastructure and capacity they need, and pay for these on a needs basis. This improves on traditional IT models where you have to permanently maintain enough infrastructure to cope with occasional spikes in traffic. As a result of utility billing and the commoditisation of infrastructure in the cloud, smaller players are gaining greater access to computing power, online storage systems, and website hosting – services that were previously accessible only by industry goliaths.

I hope that helps! Are there any cloud terms out there that you still don’t understand?

By Mark Randall, chief customer officer of listed cloud services provider, Bulletproof.

Learn more at www.brw.com.au! 

 

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