Defining the cloud and its benefits - Amazon Web Services (AWS) Tutorial

- [Instructor] There are many benefits related to the use of cloud computing. Let's discuss some of them here, beginning with IT infrastructure outsourcing. With cloud computing in the public cloud, we are running IT services on somebody else's equipment. That would be running on the underlying hardware that is available within the public cloud providers data centers. So this means that those IT services are accessible to customers over a network such as the internet. So there's an element of risk transference here in the sense that instead of the cloud customer having to acquire and manage equipment on premises which is a responsibility, instead that gets transferred over as being the cloud service providers responsibility for the underlying equipment. However, the results are the notion of shared IT responsibility. As an example, imagine that the public cloud service provider has in their data center, network communication equipment and storage arrays to allow public cloud storage. While from the customer's perspective, it's their responsibility to set up that cloud storage and to configure it such as whether data replicates across geographical regions and whether or not data is encrypted in the cloud, hence shared IT responsibility. Then, there are many different third party security accreditations that public cloud providers can acquire. For security standards related to PCI DSS, the payment card industry data security standard. This is related to credit card holder information and security controls in place to protect it. Then we've got ISO/IEC standards such as 27017:2015. This one deals with making sure that we have appropriate security controls in place when using cloud services. On the legal and regulatory side, we have HIPAA, the health insurance portability and accountability act. This one is a US federal law that's designed to protect sensitive health information as related to patients for healthcare providers and healthcare plans. Then we've got the general data protection regulation or GDPR. This legislation comes from the EU, the European Union and it's designed to protect EU citizen private data regardless of where it's collected and processed. You can check out public cloud provider security compliance as I'm doing here on the Amazon Web Services or AWS compliance programs webpage. So if I were to scroll down here a little bit, I would have standards related to ISO, PCI, and as we go further down, it gets a little bit more specific to different regions and types of government agencies. So FedRAMP security compliance, FIPS, there's HIPAA. And if I go further down, even other countries like Canada and PIPEDA. So the thing to bear in mind is just because the cloud provider adheres to the security standards or laws and regulations, that's on their responsibility. But what about the cloud customer responsibility? As cloud customers, we too must also adhere to the respective security standards or laws and regulations that apply to our organization. With ground computing, there are ongoing monthly expenses otherwise called OPEX for operating expenses. In the public cloud, we don't have to invest upfront in equipment on premises because that is the responsibility of the public cloud service provider. So therefore, if we are exclusively using public cloud services, there's no need for capital expenditures or CapEx for on premises equipment. Instead we have monthly ongoing costs. We have a cloud subscription cost and that also can be based on how much we use, often referred to as pay as you go. So as you might imagine, the more virtual machines that you have running in the cloud, the more cloud storage you use, the more you pay each month. But there are ways to save on cloud computing costs such as with running virtual machines in the cloud. There's this option of spot instances, which refers to extra compute capacity available in data centers. And so what you can do is for a discount, you can deploy virtual machines as spot instances, however, that extra compute capacity might go away, and so you shouldn't run mission critical workloads in spot instances, instead, maybe things like batch processing, you can benefit from using that compute capacity at a discount. Another way to save costs with compute whether it's database or virtual machines in the cloud is reserved instances where you can pay upfront for a one or three year commitment for example, at a great discount. So because you're paying for 24 seven usage, let's say for a year, because you know you need that usage in the cloud, you might experience a 60 or 70% discount compared to pay as you go. Another benefit of cloud computing is the global reach the public cloud providers have through their data centers which are distributed around the world. This lends itself nicely to things like high availability. As an example, we might have a mission critical web application that we configure as being highly available. For instance, we configure it to be up and running in more than one region supported by the provider. So if there's a regional disruption, that mission critical web app is still available in another region. Content delivery networks or CDNs are configurations used to cash or copy information to different geographical regions thereby placing it closer to users that might request it. And so when a user in Europe requests something from a web app, such as streaming media, if that's available locally, it's much quicker than if that European user had to request that media from the West coast of the US. Yet another benefit is the use of inter data center high-speed network links by the cloud provider. So instead of transferring everything over the internet, these are high-speed links whereby cloud customers can benefit through things like replicating data between cloud provider regions.