What are the basic characteristics of enterprise cloud computing, and what are the main stages in the construction process?

1 The concept and characteristics of cloud computing 

1.1 What is the cloud 

Cloud computing, a popular term in the IT industry in recent years, is not a new technology, but a fusion of multi-door IT technology. This article will briefly introduce the basic concepts and characteristics of cloud computing, explore why enterprises need cloud computing and the process of building cloud computing.

1.1 What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing is an internet-related service growth, usage, and delivery model that provides dynamically scalable and virtualized resources over the Internet. Simply put, cloud computing, which utilizes the transmission capabilities of the Internet to transfer data storage and processing from local servers to the Internet, is not a new technology, but a product of the convergence of traditional IT technologies such as distributed computing, parallel computing, network storage, virtualization, and so on.

Cloud computing is divided into narrow cloud computing and broad cloud computing. Narrow cloud computing refers to the delivery and uses patterns of IT infrastructure, which refers to the network to obtain the required resources (hardware, platforms, software) in an on-demand, scalable manner. The network that provides resources is called the cloud. Broad cloud computing refers to the delivery and uses patterns of services, which are the services needed to be obtained on demand and scalable over the network, either IT infrastructure and software or any other service.

1.2 The basic characteristics of cloud computing

• Resource deployment virtualization
• Resource allocation is dynamic
• Demand service self-service
• Network-centric
• The service is metered
• Pooling and transparency of resources

2 Enterprise cloud computing

2.1 Why cloud computing is needed

Cloud computing solves the dynamic demand for IT resources and IT costs, allowing IT departments to focus on providing information services and business processes. The construction of an enterprise data center requires a lot of resource investment, the new information system will face the gradual aging and replacement of hardware equipment 5 years after completion, and the application software will often face the need to upgrade. Besides, enterprises invest heavily in IT but can not meet the dynamic needs of the business, even after virtualization, it is difficult to solve the increasing demand for changes in business resources, IT resources can not be dynamically expanded restrictions have become a stumbling block to the development of enterprise business.

As technologies such as virtualization continue to grow, IT resources can already provide global dynamic scheduling capabilities through automated architectures, which increase the scalability and scalability of IT architectures. Large-scale computing and data processing system has been widely used in distributed, parallel processing architecture, computing-intensive, data-intensive, large-scale data file system has become the foundation of cloud computing architecture, ultra-high-speed network platform enables information to be transmitted and exchanged quickly. Enterprise deployment of cloud computing already has a technical foundation, and enterprise IT will inevitably be upgraded from the original information architecture to dynamically scalable, on-demand IT services.

2.2 The process of building enterprise cloud computing

Cloud computing construction is divided into three stages: the basic cloud stage, the platform cloud stage, the service cloud stage. Enterprises first need to turn the existing information architecture into a cloud architecture, i.e., a virtualized data center, and then deploy the underlying cloud architecture, that is, middleware, to platform IT resources, and the third step is to implement the deployment of business-oriented applications based on the middleware platform cloud to provide IT services to the enterprise business.

(1) The basic cloud phase

This stage is mainly to realize the virtualization of enterprise IT basic resources (computing processing power, storage, network), improve resource utilization, unified management, and maintenance of IT resources, provide users with basic IT resources services, provide high disaster tolerance mechanism, elastic computing power, provide unified computing resource pool and storage pool, realize disaster tolerance, automated repair, automated management and dynamic allocation of resources within the resource pool.

(2) Platform cloud phase

Web-based support for the full lifecycle of business applications, including product design, development, testing, deployment, production operation, etc., can also be called the base software platform stage. The main features of this stage are: to provide unified middleware services, messaging services, integration services, and other basic services, used as a business software operating support platform, middleware can be very good interaction with the underlying cloud computing, better use of virtualized resources, provide a unified management platform, can achieve unified management of hardware resources, virtualized resources, middleware resources, realize the unified deployment of hardware resources, virtualized resources, middleware resources, more reasonable use of effective resources.

(3) Service cloud phase

Build a variety of cloud services based on the platform cloud and provide business support directly to users. Because middleware is a direct support entity for business systems, business cloud services are built on the platform cloud and will be better able to provide available services externally. Main features: business services on-demand, user-side equipment through customization, to achieve different service combinations, the same service can be used by different user-side devices, software services to achieve socialization, intensive, professional.

2.3 Enterprise cloud computing operating model

Whether you're using infrastructure cloud (IaaS), platform cloud (PaaS), or application cloud (SaaS), enterprises need to consider the adoption.

The service provider's computing resources are also self-built cloud computing resources. The present point of view, mainly divided into the following three operating models.

Mode one, enterprise construction, enterprise operation. This is a typical private cloud model, enterprises build their own cloud computing infrastructure resources, basic resources are within the enterprise data center, and the enterprise itself is responsible for running and maintaining the work.

Mode two, enterprise construction, operation, and operation outsourcing. This is also a private cloud, but enterprises only invest in building, and cloud computing architecture operations outsourcing to service providers, the underlying resources are still in the enterprise data center.

Mode three, service provider construction, enterprise rental. Cloud computing resources are built by service providers, and enterprises simply rent cloud computing services as needed, for example, service providers provide Internet-oriented public services (e.g. mailboxes, instant messaging, shared disaster tolerance, etc.), cloud architecture and public network connectivity, service providers to maintain their cloud computing resources and ensure the data security of different enterprise users.

Cloud computing will not only bring about changes in IT patterns but also changes in IT services. In the service-oriented era of cloud computing, businesses. Only need to pay attention to their own needs of data, and the calculation of data, data storage are implemented with services in the cloud. Cloud service providers are focusing their core business on the operation of IT architecture, and services will be at the heart of the next generation of IT.