From the course: Cisco DevNet Associate (200-901) Cert Prep 4: Application Deployment and Security

Learn to deploy applications with virtual machines

From the course: Cisco DevNet Associate (200-901) Cert Prep 4: Application Deployment and Security

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Learn to deploy applications with virtual machines

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- [Narrator] So far, we have discussed different deployment environments, such as the public cloud, the private cloud, and edge computing. In this section, we will talk about deploying applications using virtual machines, bare-metal servers, as well as containers with a focus on their usage in the public cloud. What exactly are virtual machines? A virtual machine or VM is an emulation of computer system using software to emulate the functionality of a physical computer. A software layer called the hypervisors is used to manage and share the underlying hardware to allow multiple environments in this case, VMs, to be isolated from each other. In each of these virtual machines, we can house a focus operating system, such as Windows or Linux. This is sometimes called full virtualization. As developers there is really no difference in the deployment process between deploying our applications on a virtual machine versus a physical computer. We could follow the same pipeline of development, testing, staging, and full production that we would normally use. Nowadays the easiest way to deploy a public-facing application is really to utilize the public cloud virtual machine services. The steps are fairly straightforward. First, we need to sign up for the account on the public cloud providers web portal. Then we would need to pick the corresponding services. For Amazon AWS, the virtual machine services is called elastic compute cloud or EC2. And for Microsoft Azure, it is called Azure compute. We could then follow the onscreen instruction to deploy a virtual machines. Once the virtual machine is provisioned, we will be given access information for either SSH or remote desktop so that we can access the virtual machine and deploy our application. Virtual machines as with other resources in the public cloud are built by usage. Luckily, many of the public cloud providers, such as Amazon AWS provides a free tier for users to experiment their services with. This is a great way to experiment with EC2 and virtual machines in general, and deploy our applications for free. Another thing that might pose some confusions for new users is picking the right location to deploy a virtual machine. A good rule of thumb is to use the location that is closest to the majority of your users. In this case, if I expect that users of my application to be mainly concentrated in the United States West Coast, I could pick US-West-2, to deploy my virtual machine and my application.

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