Public Cloud

Delivering Applications on Public Clouds

Public clouds can offer secure, inexpensive infrastructure environments that cover a wide range of services for companies that are flexible with their needs. Public clouds provide broad network access to a shared pool of resources that can be rapidly provisioned when needed and released when not in use. Once established, users need to be able to access this resource pool without IT or service provider interaction. Public clouds deliver a metered/measured service, like electricity, with the ability to bill back based on usage. Public clouds are a great fit for compute intensive applications over a limited period of time or when the application has widely varying capacity requirements.

Public cloud resources are shared among many people that have no affinity. Public clouds have overcome some early security problems and now generally offer secure access to systems and data. Public clouds are most often selected when the data doesn’t have significant privacy risks or compliance requirements associated with it. Public clouds are often implemented when the application can easily stand alone or integrate with internal IT through browser access and simple, loosely coupled communications architectures that are tolerant of high latency.

Despite the numerous benefits of cloud computing, there is a huge gap between the cloud infrastructure and the enterprise requirements associated with running an application securely, robustly and effectively. Particularly with public clouds, it is important that the application be independent from any specific cloud service so that it has the flexibility to run in multiple clouds or migrate between clouds based on requirements. There is a layer of services associated with the care and feeding of the cloud infrastructure including monitoring, backup and D/R, auto-scaling, security management and billing. There is another layer of service associated with the application itself including customer provisioning, helpdesk, application upgrades, application management and reporting. Finally there is a layer of support services that includes things like cloud migration, business services consulting and account management. These activities are application and implementation specific and require a deep knowledge of both the underlying cloud platform and the application architecture and usage.