Cloud Computing Unit 3

Layered Cloud Architecture design

Architecture of cloud computing is the combination of both SOA (Service Oriented

Architecture) and EDA (Event Driven Architecture). Client infrastructure,
application, service, runtime cloud, storage, infrastructure, management and security
all these are the components of cloud computing architecture.

1. Frontend :Frontend of the cloud architecture refers to the client side of cloud
computing system. Means it contains all the user interfaces and applications which
are used by the client to access the cloud computing services/resources. For
example, use of a web browser to access the cloud platform.

Client Infrastructure – Client Infrastructure is a part of the frontend component.

It contains the applications and user interfaces which are required to access the

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 cloud platform.

In other words, it provides a GUI( Graphical User Interface ) to interact with the
cloud.

2. Backend : Backend refers to the cloud itself which is used by the service provider.
It contains the resources as well as manages the resources and provides security
mechanisms. Along with this, it includes huge storage, virtual applications, virtual
machines, traffic control mechanisms, deployment models, etc.

1. Application –Application in backend refers to a software or platform to which

client accesses. Means it provides the service in backend as per the client
requirement.

2. Service –Service in backend refers to the major three types of cloud based
services like SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. Also manages which type of service the
user accesses.

3. Runtime Cloud-Runtime cloud in backend provides the execution and Runtime

platform/environment to the Virtual machine.

4. Storage –Storage in backend provides flexible and scalable storage service and
management of stored data.

5. Infrastructure –Cloud Infrastructure in backend refers to the hardware and

software components of cloud like it includes servers, storage, network devices,
virtualization software etc.

6. Management –Management in backend refers to management of backend

components like application, service, runtime cloud, storage, infrastructure, and
other security mechanisms etc.

7. Security –Security in backend refers to implementation of different security

mechanisms in the backend for secure cloud resources, systems, files, and
infrastructure to end-users.

8. Internet –Internet connection acts as the medium or a bridge between frontend

and backend and establishes the interaction and communication between
frontend and backend.

NIST Cloud Computing Reference Architecture

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 NIST Cloud Computing reference architecture defines five major performers:

Cloud Provider

Cloud Carrier

Cloud Broker

Cloud Auditor

Cloud Consumer

Each performer is an object (a person or an organization) that contributes to a

transaction or method and/or performs tasks in Cloud computing. There are five
major actors defined in the NIST cloud computing reference architecture, which are
described below:

1. Cloud Service Providers: A group or object that delivers cloud services to cloud
consumers or end-users. It offers various components of cloud computing. Cloud
computing consumers purchase a growing variety of cloud services from cloud
service providers. There are various categories of cloud-based services mentioned
below:

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 IaaS Providers: In this model, the cloud service providers offer infrastructure
components that would exist in an on-premises data center. These components
consist of servers, networking, and storage as well as the virtualization layer.

SaaS Providers: In Software as a Service (SaaS), vendors provide a wide

sequence of business technologies, such as Human resources management
(HRM) software, customer relationship management (CRM) software, all of
which the SaaS vendor hosts and provides services through the internet.

PaaS Providers: In Platform as a Service (PaaS), vendors offer cloud

infrastructure and services that can access to perform many functions. In PaaS,
services and products are mostly utilized in software development. PaaS
providers offer more services than IaaS providers. PaaS providers provide
operating system and middleware along with application stack, to the underlying
infrastructure.

2. Cloud Carrier: The mediator who provides offers connectivity and transport of
cloud services within cloud service providers and cloud consumers. It allows access
to the services of the cloud through Internet networks, telecommunication, and other
access devices. Network and telecom carriers or a transport agent can provide
distribution. A consistent level of services is provided when cloud providers set up
Service Level Agreements (SLA) with a cloud carrier. In general, Carrier may be
required to offer dedicated and encrypted connections.
3. Cloud Broker: An organization or a unit that manages the performance, use, and
delivery of cloud services by enhancing specific capability and offers value-added
services to cloud consumers. It combines and integrates various services into one or
more new services. They provide service arbitrage which allows flexibility and
opportunistic choices. There are major three services offered by a cloud broker:

Service Intermediation.

Service Aggregation.

Service Arbitrage.

4. Cloud Auditor: An entity that can conduct independent assessment of cloud

services, security, performance, and information system operations of the cloud
implementations. The services that are provided by Cloud Service Providers (CSP)
can be evaluated by service auditors in terms of privacy impact, security control, and
performance, etc. Cloud Auditor can make an assessment of the security controls in
the information system to determine the extent to which the controls are
implemented correctly, operating as planned and constructing the desired outcome

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 with respect to meeting the security necessities for the system. There are three
major roles of Cloud Auditor which are mentioned below:

Security Audit.

Privacy Impact Audit.

Performance Audit.

5. Cloud Consumer: A cloud consumer is the end-user who browses or utilizes the
services provided by Cloud Service Providers (CSP), sets up service contracts with
the cloud provider. The cloud consumer pays peruse of the service provisioned.
Measured services utilized by the consumer. In this, a set of organizations having
mutual regulatory constraints performs a security and risk assessment for each use
case of Cloud migrations and deployments. Cloud consumers use Service-Level
Agreement (SLAs) to specify the technical performance requirements to be fulfilled
by a cloud provider. SLAs can cover terms concerning the quality of service, security,
and remedies for performance failures. A cloud provider may also list in the SLAs a
set of limitations or boundaries, and obligations that cloud consumers must accept.
In a mature market environment, a cloud consumer can freely pick a cloud provider
with better pricing and more favourable terms. Typically, a cloud provider’s public
pricing policy and SLAs are non-negotiable, although a cloud consumer who
assumes to have substantial usage might be able to negotiate for better contracts.

Public Cloud
The public cloud refers to the cloud computing model in which IT services are
delivered via the internet. As the most popular model of cloud computing services,
the public cloud offers vast choices in terms of solutions and computing resources to
address the growing needs of organizations of all sizes and verticals.
The defining features of a public cloud solution include:

High elasticity and scalability

A low-cost subscription-based pricing tier

Services on the public cloud may be free, freemium, or subscription-based, wherein

you’re charged based on the computing resources you consume.
The computing functionality may range from common services—email, apps, and
storage—to the enterprise-grade OS platform or infrastructure environments used
for software development and testing.

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 The cloud vendor is responsible for developing, managing, and maintaining the pool
of computing resources shared between multiple tenants from across the network.

Advantages
No Capital Expenditure: No investments required to deploy and maintain the IT
infrastructure.

Technical agility: High scalability and flexibility to meet unpredictable workload

demands.

Business focus: The reduced complexity and requirements on in-house IT

expertise is minimized, as the cloud vendor is responsible for infrastructure
management.

Affordability: Flexible pricing options based on different SLA offerings

Cost agility: The cost agility allows organizations to follow lean growth
strategies and focus their investments on innovation projects

Drawbacks
Lack of cost control: The total cost of ownership (TCO) can rise exponentially
for large-scale usage, specifically for midsize to large enterprises.

Lack of security: Public cloud is the least secure, by nature, so it isn’t best for
sensitive mission-critical IT workloads.

Minimal technical control: Low visibility and control into the infrastructure may
not meet your compliance needs.

Private Cloud
The private cloud refers to any cloud solution dedicated for use by a single
organization. In the private cloud, you’re not sharing cloud computing resources with
any other organization.
The data center resources may be located on-premise or operated by a third-party
vendor off-site. The computing resources are isolated and delivered via a secure
private network, and not shared with other customers.

Private cloud is customizable to meet the unique business and security needs of the
organization. With greater visibility and control into the infrastructure, organizations
can operate compliance-sensitive IT workloads without compromising on the security
and performance previously only achieved with dedicated on-premise data centers.

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 Advantages
Exclusive environments: Dedicated and secure environments that cannot be
accessed by other organizations.

Custom security: Compliance to stringent regulations as organizations can run

protocols, configurations, and measures to customize security based on unique
workload requirements

Scalability without tradeoffs: High scalability and efficiency to meet

unpredictable demands without compromising on security and performance

Efficient performance: The private cloud is reliable for high SLA performance
and efficiency.

Flexibility: The private cloud is flexible as you transform the infrastructure

based on ever-changing business and IT needs of the organization.

Drawbacks
Price: The private cloud is an expensive solution with a relatively high TCO
compared to public cloud alternatives, especially for short-term use cases.

Mobile difficulty: Mobile users may have limited access to the private cloud
considering the high security measures in place.

Scalability: The infrastructure may not offer high scalability to meet

unpredictable demands if the cloud data center is limited to on-premise
computing resources

Hybrid Cloud
The hybrid cloud is any cloud infrastructure environment that combines both public
and private cloud solutions.

The resources are typically orchestrated as an integrated infrastructure environment.

Apps and data workloads can share the resources between public and private cloud
deployment based on organizational business and technical policies around aspects
like:

Security

Performance

Scalability

Cost

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 Efficiency

This is a common example of hybrid cloud: Organizations can use private cloud
environments for their IT workloads and complement the infrastructure with public
cloud resources to accommodate occasional spikes in network traffic.

Or, perhaps you use the public cloud for workloads and data that aren’t sensitive,
saving cost, but opt for the private cloud for sensitive data.

As a result, access to additional computing capacity does not require the high
Capital Expense of a private cloud environment but is delivered as a short-term IT
service via a public cloud solution. The environment itself is seamlessly integrated to
ensure optimum performance and scalability to changing business needs.

Advantages
Policy-driven option: Flexible policy-driven deployment to distribute workloads
across public and private infrastructure environments based on security,
performance, and cost requirements.

Scale with security: Scalability of public cloud environments is achieved

without exposing sensitive IT workloads to the inherent security risks.

Reliability: Distributing services across multiple data centers, some public,

some private, results in maximum reliability.

Cost control: Improved security posture as sensitive IT workloads run on

dedicated resources in private clouds while regular workloads are spread across
inexpensive public cloud infrastructure to tradeoff for cost investments

Drawbacks
Price: Toggling between public and private can be hard to track, resulting in
wasteful spending.

Management: Strong compatibility and integration is required between cloud

infrastructure spanning different locations and categories. This is a limitation with
public cloud deployments, for which organizations lack direct control over the
infrastructure.

Added complexity: Additional infrastructure complexity is introduced as

organizations operate and manage an evolving mix of private and public cloud
architecture.

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 IaaS
IaaS is on-demand access to cloud-hosted computing infrastructure - servers,
storage capacity and networking resources - that customers can provision, configure
and use in much the same way as they use on-premises hardware. The difference is
that the cloud service provider hosts, manages and maintains the hardware
and computing resources in its own data centers. IaaS customers use the hardware
via an internet connection, and pay for that use on a subscription or pay-as-you-
go basis.
Typically IaaS customers can choose between virtual machines (VMs) hosted on
shared physical hardware (the cloud service provider manages virtualization) or bare
metal servers on dedicated (unshared) physical hardware. Customers can provision,
configure and operate the servers and infrastructure resources via a graphical
dashboard, or programmatically through application programming interfaces (APIs).

IaaS can be thought of as the original 'as a service' offering: Every

major cloud service provider - Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud,
Microsoft Azure - began by offering some form of IaaS.

Benefits of IaaS
Compared to traditional IT, IaaS gives customers more flexibility build out computing
resources as needed, and to scale them up or down in response to spikes or slow-
downs in traffic. IaaS lets customers avoid the up-front expense and overhead of

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 purchasing and maintaining its own on-premises data center. It also eliminates the
constant trade-off between the waste of purchasing excess on-premises capacity to
accommodate spikes, versus the poor performance or outages that can result from
not having enough capacity for unanticipated traffic bursts or growth.
Other benefits of IaaS include:

Higher availability: With IaaS a company can create redundant servers easily,
and even create them in other geographies to ensure availability during local
power outages or physical disasters.

Lower latency, improved performance. Because IaaS providers typically

operate data centers in multiple geographies, IaaS customers can locate apps
and services closer to users to minimize latency and maximize performance.

Improved responsiveness. Customers can provision resources in a matter of

minutes, test new ideas quickly and quickly roll out new ideas to more users.

Comprehensive security. With a high-level of security on-site, at data

centers, and via encryption, organizations can often take advantage of more
advanced security and protection they could provide if they hosted the cloud
infrastructure in-house.

Faster access to best-of-breed technology. Cloud providers compete with

each other by providing the latest technologies to their users, IaaS customers
can take advantage of these technologies much earlier (and at far less cost)
than they can implement them on premises.

IaaS use cases

Common uses of IaaS include:

Disaster recovery: Instead of setting up redundant servers in multiple

locations, IaaS can deploy its disaster recovery solution to the cloud provider's
existing geographically-dispersed infrastructure.

Ecommerce: IaaS is an excellent option for online retailers that frequently see
spikes in traffic. The ability to scale up during periods of high demand and high-
quality security are essential in today’s 24-7 retail industry.

Internet of Things (IoT), event processing, artificial intelligence

(AI): IaaS makes it easier to set up and scale up data storage and computing
resources for these and other applications that work with huge volumes of data.

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 Startups: Startups can't afford to sink capital into on-premises IT
infrastructure. IaaS gives them access to enterprise-class data
center capabilities without the up-front investment in hardware and management
overhead.

Software development: With IaaS, the infrastructure for testing and

development environments can be set up much more quickly than on-premises.
(However, this use case is better suited to PaaS, as you'll read in the next
section.)

PaaS
PaaS provides a cloud-based platform for developing, running, managing
applications. The cloud services provider hosts, manages and maintains all the
hardware and software included in the platform - servers (for development, testing
and deployment), operating system (OS) software, storage, networking,
databases, middleware, runtimes, frameworks, development tools - as well as
related services for security, operating system and software upgrades, backups and
more.
Users access the PaaS through a graphical user interface (GUI), where
development or DevOps teams can collaborate on all their work across the entire
application lifecycle including coding, integration, testing, delivery, deployment, and
feedback.
Examples of PaaS solutions include AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Google App Engine,
Microsoft Windows Azure, and Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud.

Benefits of PaaS
The primary benefit of PaaS is that it allows customers to build, test, deploy run,
update and scale applications more quickly and cost-effectively than they could if
they had to build out and manage their own on-premises platform. Other benefits
include:

Faster time to market: PaaS enables development teams to spin-up

development, testing and production environments in minutes, vs. weeks or
months.

Low- to no-risk testing and adoption of new technologies: PaaS platforms

typically include access to a wide range of the latest resources up and down the
application stack. This allows companies to test new operating systems,

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 languages, and other tools without having to make substantial investments in
them, or in the infrastructure required to run them.

Simplified collaboration: As a cloud-based service, PaaS provides a

shared software development environment, giving development and operations
teams access to all the tools they need, from anywhere with an Internet
connection.

A more scalable approach: With PaaS, organizations can purchase additional

capacity for building, testing, staging and running applications whenever they
need it.

Less to manage: PaaS offloads infrastructure management, patches, updates

and other administrative tasks to the cloud service provider.

PaaS use cases

PaaS can advance a number of development and IT initiatives including:

API development and management: With its built-in frameworks, PaaS makes
it easier for teams to develop, run, manage and secure APIs for sharing data
and functionality between applications.

Internet of Things (IoT): PaaS supports a range of programming languages

(Java, Python, Swift, etc.), tools and application environments used for IoT
application development and real-time processing of data from IoT devices.

Agile development and DevOps: PaaS solutions typically cover all the
requirements of a DevOps toolchain, and provide built-in automation to
support continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).

Cloud-native development and hybrid cloud strategy: PaaS solutions

support cloud-native development technologies
- microservices, containers, Kubernetes, serverless computing - that enable
developers to build once, then deploy and manage consistently across private
cloud, public cloud and on-premises environments.

SaaS
SaaS (sometimes called cloud application services) is cloud-hosted, ready-to-use
application software. Users pay a monthly or annual fee to use a complete
application from within a web browser, desktop client or mobile app. The application
and all of the infrastructure required to deliver it - servers, storage,

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 networking, middleware, application software, data storage - are hosted and
managed by the SaaS vendor.
The vendor manages all upgrades and patches to the software, usually invisibly to
customers. Typically, the vendor ensures a level of availability, performance and
security as part of a service level agreement (SLA). Customers can add more users
and data storage on demand at additional cost.
Today, anyone who uses a or mobile phone almost certainly uses some form
of SaaS. Email, social media, and cloud file storage solutions (such as Dropbox or
Box) are examples of SaaS applications people use every day in their personal lives.
Popular business or enterprise SaaS solutions include Salesforce (customer
relationship management software), HubSpot (marketing software), Trello
(workflow management), Slack (collaboration and messaging), and Canva
(graphics). Many applications designed originally for the desktop (e.g., Adobe
Creative Suite) are now available as SaaS (e.g., Adobe Creative Cloud).

Benefits of SaaS
The main benefit of SaaS is that it offloads all infrastructure and application
management to the SaaS vendor. All the user has to do is create an account, pay
the fee and start using the application. The vendor handles everything else, from
maintaining the server hardware and software to managing user access and security,
storing and managing data, implementing upgrades and patches and more.
Other benefits of SaaS include:

Minimal risk: Many SaaS products offer a free trial period, or low monthly fees
that let customers try the software to see if it will meet their needs, with little or
no financial risk.

Anytime/anywhere productivity: Users can work with SaaS apps on any

device with a browser and an internet connection.

Easy scalability: Adding users is as simple as registering and paying for new
seats; customers can purchase more data storage for a nominal charge.

Some SaaS vendors even enable customization of their product by providing a

companion PaaS solution. One well-known example is Heroku,
a PaaS solution for Salesforce.

SaaS use cases

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 Today, just about any personal or employee productivity application is available
as SaaS; specific use cases are too numerous to mention (some are listed above). If
an end user or organization can find a SaaS solution with the required functionality,
in most cases it will provide a significantly simpler, more scalable and more cost-
effective alternative to on-premises software.

Architectural Design Challenges

Cloud computing is used for enabling global access to mutual pools of resources
such as services, apps, data, servers, and computer networks. It is done on either a
third-party server located in a data center or a privately owned cloud. This makes
data-accessing contrivances more reliable and efficient, with nominal administration
effort.

Because cloud technology depends on the allocation of resources to attain

consistency and economy of scale, similar to a utility, it is also fairly cost-effective,
making it the choice for many small businesses and firms.
Portability

This is another challenge to cloud computing those applications should easily be

migrated from one cloud provider to another. There must not be vendor lock-in.
However, it is not yet made possible because each of the cloud provider uses
different standard languages for their platforms.
Cost

Cloud computing itself is affordable, but tuning the platform according to the
company’s needs can be expensive. Furthermore, the expense of transferring the
data to public clouds can prove to be a problem for short-lived and small-scale
projects.

Companies can save some money on system maintenance, management, and

acquisitions. But they also have to invest in additional bandwidth, and the absence of
routine control in an infinitely scalable computing platform can increase costs.
Interoperability

It means the application on one platform should be able to incorporate services from
the other platforms. It is made possible via web services, but developing such web
services is very complex.
Performance Challenges

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 Performance is an important factor while considering cloud-based solutions. If the
performance of the cloud is not satisfactory, it can drive away users and decrease
profits. Even a little latency while loading an app or a web page can result in a huge
drop in the percentage of users. This latency can be a product of inefficient load
balancing, which means that the server cannot efficiently split the incoming traffic so
as to provide the best user experience. Challenges also arise in the case of fault
tolerance, which means the operations continue as required even when one or more
of the components fail.

Downtime
Downtime is a significant shortcoming of cloud technology. No seller can promise a
platform that is free of possible downtime. Cloud technology makes small companies
reliant on their connectivity, so companies with an untrustworthy internet connection
probably want to think twice before adopting cloud computing.

Multi-Cloud Environments
Due to an increase in the options available to the companies, enterprises not only
use a single cloud but depend on multiple cloud service providers. Most of these
companies use hybrid cloud tactics and close to 84% are dependent on multiple
clouds. This often ends up being hindered and difficult to manage for the
infrastructure team. The process most of the time ends up being highly complex for
the IT team due to the differences between multiple cloud providers.
High Dependence on Network

Since cloud computing deals with provisioning resources in real-time, it deals with
enormous amounts of data transfer to and from the servers. This is only made
possible due to the availability of the high-speed network. Although these data and
resources are exchanged over the network, this can prove to be highly vulnerable in
case of limited bandwidth or cases when there is a sudden outage. Even when the
enterprises can cut their hardware costs, they need to ensure that the internet
bandwidth is high as well there are zero network outages, or else it can result in a
potential business loss. It is therefore a major challenge for smaller enterprises that
have to maintain network bandwidth that comes with a high cost.

Cloud Storage
Cloud storage is a cloud computing model that enables storing data and files on the
internet through a cloud computing provider that you access either through the public
internet or a dedicated private network connection. The provider securely stores,
manages, and maintains the storage servers, infrastructure, and network to ensure

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 you have access to the data when you need it at virtually unlimited scale, and with
elastic capacity. Cloud storage removes the need to buy and manage your own data
storage infrastructure, giving you agility, scalability, and durability, with any time,
anywhere data access.

Advantages of Cloud Storage

Cost effectiveness

With cloud storage, there is no hardware to purchase, no storage to provision, and

no extra capital being used for business spikes. You can add or remove storage
capacity on demand, quickly change performance and retention characteristics, and
only pay for storage that you actually use. As data becomes infrequently and rarely
accessed, you can even automatically move it to lower-cost storage, thus creating
even more cost savings. By moving storage workloads from on premises to the
cloud, you can reduce total cost of ownership by removing overprovisioning and the
cost of maintaining storage infrastructure.

Increased agility
With cloud storage, resources are only a click away. You reduce the time to make
those resources available to your organization from weeks to just minutes. This
results in a dramatic increase in agility for your organization. Your staff is largely
freed from the tasks of procurement, installation, administration, and maintenance.
And because cloud storage integrates with a wide range of analytics tools, your staff
can now extract more insights from your data to fuel innovation.

Faster deployment
When development teams are ready to begin, infrastructure should never slow them
down. Cloud storage services allow IT to quickly deliver the exact amount of storage
needed, whenever and wherever it's needed. Your developers can focus on solving
complex application problems instead of having to manage storage systems.
Efficient data management
By using cloud storage lifecycle management policies, you can perform powerful
information management tasks including automated tiering or locking down data in
support of compliance requirements. You can also use cloud storage to create multi-
region or global storage for your distributed teams by using tools such as replication.
You can organize and manage your data in ways that support specific use cases,
create cost efficiencies, enforce security, and meet compliance requirements.
Virtually unlimited scalability

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 Cloud storage delivers virtually unlimited storage capacity, allowing you to scale up
as much and as quickly as you need. This removes the constraints of on-premises
storage capacity. You can efficiently scale cloud storage up and down as required for
analytics, data lakes, backups, or cloud native applications. Users can access
storage from anywhere, at any time, without worrying about complex storage
allocation processes, or waiting for new hardware.

Business continuity
Cloud storage providers store your data in highly secure data centers, protecting
your data and ensuring business continuity. Cloud storage services are designed to
handle concurrent device failure by quickly detecting and repairing any lost
redundancy. You can further protect your data by using versioning and replication
tools to more easily recover from both unintended user actions or application
failures.
With cloud storage services, you can:

Cost-effectively protect data in the cloud without sacrificing performance.

Scale up your backup resources in minutes as data requirements change.

Protect backups with a data center and network architecture built for security-
sensitive organizations.

Types of Cloud Storage

Object storage
Organizations have to store a massive and growing amount of unstructured data,
such as photos, videos, machine learning (ML), sensor data, audio files, and other
types of web content, and finding scalable, efficient, and affordable ways to store
them can be a challenge. Object storage is a data storage architecture for large
stores of unstructured data. Objects store data in the format it arrives in and makes it
possible to customize metadata in ways that make the data easier to access and
analyze. Instead of being organized in files or folder hierarchies, objects are kept in
secure buckets that deliver virtually unlimited scalability. It is also less costly to store
large data volumes.

Applications developed in the cloud often take advantage of the vast scalability and
metadata characteristics of object storage. Object storage solutions are ideal for
building modern applications from scratch that require scale and flexibility, and can
also be used to import existing data stores for analytics, backup, or archive.

File storage

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 File-based storage or file storage is widely used among applications and stores data
in a hierarchical folder and file format. This type of storage is often known as a
network-attached storage (NAS) server with common file level protocols of Server
Message Block (SMB) used in Windows instances and Network File System (NFS)
found in Linux.
Block storage

Enterprise applications like databases or enterprise resource planning (ERP)

systems often require dedicated, low-latency storage for each host. This is
analogous to direct-attached storage (DAS) or a storage area network (SAN). In this
case, you can use a cloud storage service that stores data in the form of blocks.
Each block has its own unique identifier for quick storage and retrieval.

Use Cases of cloud storage

Analytics and data lakes
Traditional on-premises storage solutions can be inconsistent in their cost,
performance, and scalability — especially over time. Analytics demand large-scale,
affordable, highly available, and secure storage pools that are commonly referred to
as data lakes.
Data lakes built on object storage keep information in its native form and include rich
metadata that allows selective extraction and use for analysis. Cloud-based data
lakes can sit at the center of multiple kinds of data warehousing and processing, as
well as big data and analytical engines, to help you accomplish your next project in
less time and with more targeted relevance.
Backup and disaster recovery

Backup and disaster recovery are critical for data protection and accessibility, but
keeping up with increasing capacity requirements can be a constant challenge.
Cloud storage brings low cost, high durability, and extreme scale to data backup and
recovery solutions. Embedded data management policies can automatically migrate
data to lower-cost storage based on frequency or timing settings, and archival vaults
can be created to help comply with legal or regulatory requirements. These benefits
allow for tremendous scale possibilities within industries such as financial services,
healthcare and life sciences, and media and entertainment that produce high
volumes of unstructured data with long-term retention needs.
Software test and development

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 Software test and development environments often require separate, independent,
and duplicate storage environments to be built out, managed, and decommissioned.
In addition to the time required, the up-front capital costs required can be extensive.
Many of the largest and most valuable companies in the world create applications in
record time by using the flexibility, performance, and low cost of cloud storage. Even
the simplest static websites can be improved at low cost. IT professionals and
developers are turning to pay-as-you-go storage options that remove management
and scale headaches.

Cloud data migration

The availability, durability, and low cloud storage costs can be very compelling. On
the other hand, IT personnel working with storage, backup, networking, security, and
compliance administrators might have concerns about the realities of transferring
large amounts of data to the cloud. For some, getting data into the cloud can be a
challenge. Hybrid, edge, and data movement services meet you where you are in
the physical world to help ease your data transfer to the cloud.
Compliance
Storing sensitive data in the cloud can raise concerns about regulation and
compliance, especially if this data is currently stored in compliant storage systems.
Cloud data compliance controls are designed to ensure that you can deploy and
enforce comprehensive compliance controls on your data, helping you satisfy
compliance requirements for virtually every regulatory agency around the globe.
Often through a shared responsibility model, cloud vendors allow customers to
manage risk effectively and efficiently in the IT environment, and provide assurance
of effective risk management through compliance with established, widely
recognized frameworks and programs.
Cloud-native application storage
Cloud-native applications use technologies like containerization and serverless to
meet customer expectations in a fast-paced and flexible manner. These applications
are typically made of small, loosely coupled, independent components called
microservices that communicate internally by sharing data or state. Cloud storage
services provide data management for such applications and provide solutions to
ongoing data storage challenges in the cloud environment.
Archive

Enterprises today face significant challenges with exponential data growth. Machine
learning (ML) and analytics give data more uses than ever before. Regulatory

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 compliance requires long retention periods. Customers need to replace on-premises
tape and disk archive infrastructure with solutions that provide enhanced data
durability, immediate retrieval times, better security and compliance, and greater
data accessibility for advanced analytics and business intelligence.
Hybrid cloud storage
Many organizations want to take advantage of the benefits of cloud storage, but
have applications running on premises that require low-latency access to their data,
or need rapid data transfer to the cloud. Hybrid cloud storage architectures connect
your on-premises applications and systems to cloud storage to help you reduce
costs, minimize management burden, and innovate with your data.

Database storage
Because block storage has high performance and is readily updatable, many
organizations use it for transactional databases. With its limited metadata, block
storage is able to deliver the ultra-low latency required for high-performance
workloads and latency sensitive applications like databases.
Block storage allows developers to set up a robust, scalable, and highly efficient
transactional database. As each block is a self-contained unit, the database
performs optimally, even when the stored data grows.
ML and IoT

With cloud storage, you can process, store, and analyze data close to your
applications and then copy data to the cloud for further analysis. With cloud storage,
you can store data efficiently and cost-effectively while supporting ML, artificial
intelligence (AI), and advanced analytics to gain insights and innovate for your
business.

STorage as a Service (STaaS)

Storage as a Service or STaaS is cloud storage that you rent from a Cloud Service
Provider (CSP) and that provides basic ways to access that storage. Enterprises,
small and medium businesses, home offices, and individuals can use the cloud for
multimedia storage, data repositories, data backup and recovery, and disaster
recovery. There are also higher-tier managed services that build on top of STaaS,
such as Database as a Service, in which you can write data into tables that are
hosted through CSP resources.
The key benefit to STaaS is that you are offloading the cost and effort to manage
data storage infrastructure and technology to a third-party CSP. This makes it much

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 more effective to scale up storage resources without investing in new hardware or
taking on configuration costs. You can also respond to changing market conditions
faster. With just a few clicks you can rent terabytes or more of storage, and you don’t
have to spin up new storage appliances on your own.

💡 You can write anything from cloud storage under this heading

Cloud Storage Provider

A cloud storage provider, also known as a managed service provider (MSP), is a
company that offers organizations and individuals the ability to place and retain data
in an off-site storage system. Customers can lease cloud storage capacity per month
or on demand.

A cloud storage provider hosts a customer's data in its own data center, providing
fee-based computing, networking and storage infrastructure. Both individual and
corporate customers can get unlimited storage capacity on a provider's servers at a
low per-gigabyte price.
Rather than store data on local storage devices, such as a hard disk drive, flash
storage or tape, customers choose a cloud storage provider to host data on a
system in a remote data center. Users can then access those files using an internet
connection.
The delivery of IT services via the internet is broadly defined as cloud computing or
utility computing. This business model first hit mainstream enterprises with the rise of
application service providers.

A cloud storage provider also sells non-storage services for a fee. Enterprises
purchase compute, software, storage and related IT components as discrete cloud
services with a pay-as-you-go license. For example, customers can opt to lease
infrastructure as a service; platform as a service; or security, software and storage as
a service.

S3
Amazon S3 or Amazon Simple Storage Service is a service offered by Amazon Web
Services (AWS) that provides object storage through a web service interface.
Amazon S3 uses the same scalable storage infrastructure that Amazon.com uses to
run its e-commerce network.[3] Amazon S3 can store any type of object, which

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 allows uses like storage for Internet applications, backups, disaster recovery, data
archives, data lakes for analytics, and hybrid cloud storage.
AWS launched Amazon S3 in the United States on March 14, 2006, then in Europe
in November 2007.

Design
Amazon S3 manages data with an object storage architecture[6] which aims to
provide scalability, high availability, and low latency with high durability.
The basic storage units of Amazon S3 are objects which are organized into buckets.
Each object is identified by a unique, user-assigned key. Buckets can be managed
using the console provided by Amazon S3, programmatically with the AWS SDK, or
the REST application programming interface. Objects can be up to five terabytes in
size.

Requests are authorized using an access control list associated with each object
bucket and support versioning which is disabled by default. Since buckets are
typically the size of an entire file system mount in other systems, this access control
scheme is very coarse-grained. In other words, unique access controls cannot be
associated with individual files.
Amazon S3 can be used to replace static web-hosting infrastructure with HTTP
client-accessible objects, index document support and error document support. The
Amazon AWS authentication mechanism allows the creation of authenticated URLs,
valid for a specified amount of time.
Every item in a bucket can also be served as a BitTorrent feed. The Amazon S3
store can act as a seed host for a torrent and any BitTorrent client can retrieve the
file. This can drastically reduce the bandwidth cost for the download of popular
objects. A bucket can be configured to save HTTP log information to a sibling
bucket; this can be used in data mining operations.

There are various User Mode File System (FUSE)–based file systems for Unix-like
operating systems (for example, Linux) that can be used to mount an S3 bucket as a
file system. The semantics of the Amazon S3 file system are not that of a POSIX file
system, so the file system may not behave entirely as expected.
An object in S3 can be between 1 byte and 5TB. If an object is larger than 5TB, it
must be divided into chunks prior to uploading. When uploading, Amazon S3 allows
a maximum of 5GB in a single upload operation; hence, objects larger than 5GB
must be uploaded via the S3 multipart upload API.

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