IaaS based Private Cloud Features Competing/Compatible with AWS Public Cloud - Part 1

About this article series:

Welcome to tutorial series on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Cloud Services with respect to Amazon Web Services (AWS). It'll help you to understand and map features of AWS cloud services with other IaaS based cloud platforms. I'd like to quote this line from 'The Matrix' movie: 

"You've to let it all go, Neo. Fear, doubt and disbelief!" (Ref: The Matrix:1999)

Cloud is like The Matrix; unless you enter you will not understand what it is.

Let's take a quick overview of most popular core components and at last, we'll see its codename in respective cloud platforms:

1. IAM (Identity and Access Management):

Imagine if an user has access rights of admin account and still maintaining their original role. Also what if total number of users are more than one million? It's a nightmare for any administrator. In case of cloud platforms, it's easily manageable through cloud services. Such a service exists in AWS to manage known as Identity and Access Management (IAM). It is the policy based service with which admin can give specific permissions to users so that they'll have restricted access to resources of their account and can't interfere with operations of others users or admin. For ex, user can see and run only his instances; not the other users accessing instances of same cloud platforms.

2. Compute (Computation Related Resources):

Rama has 1 GB RAM, 1 vCPU machine with size of 50 GB Total HDD. Now, if he wants to test Windows 8, he needs to buy new workstation compatible with Windows 8. On the other hand, using a cloud service, it is as simple as turning your system on. Here the power intromittent is Compute service. More powerful your machine in cloud, more faster and efficient your operations are. It provides you memory, CPU cores and size of Hard Disk you need for the tasks.

3. Storage (Object & Block):

Hari, is savvy Big data developer, who wants to store & retrieve his data from Cloud on frequent basis for his work. Which storage type should he use? There are two main services available: Object Storage and Block Storage. Object storage is helpful for storing and retrieving the storage data. The data is stored in the form of objects so that it can easily call over SOAP or REST API requests. The main advantage of this storage service is write once, read anywhere. He should use Block Storage when there is need of frequent update for large size data. In this case, data is stored as bytes/records as a bunch i.e. Block. The advantage of block storage is contents get updated at faster rate.

4. VPC (Networking):

Gopal wants to create his own network similar to that of a large organizational structure. It seems to be difficult at first but with help of cloud services, it is not. In cloud computing , networking service brings the power to create and architect your own networks. Along with it, you can also work with subnets, routers, firewalls, load balancers and many more. 

We'll see rest of the components in the next article: Part 2

References

1. https://www.quora.com/OpenStack/What-is-the-difference-between-Block-storage-and-Object-storage-Also-In-what-way-they-are-similar-dissimilar-to-POSIX
2. http://searchcloudstorage.techtarget.com/tip/Advantages-of-using-an-object-storage-system
3. http://searchcloudstorage.techtarget.com/feature/How-an-object-store-differs-from-file-and-block-storage