You may be new to cloud computing, but you may have experience of architecture from a classic on-premises solution within a data centre. This video assumes you have the knowledge of how on-premise data centres work and makes comparisons between that and how cloud computing works. The data centre, as a whole, and its architecture can logically be broken down as follows. The location, where it's geographically located. Physical security, both external and internal. Mechanical and electrical infrastructure, such as computer and air conditioning units, generators, UPS, fire suppression. Network infrastructure, such as switches, routers, and firewalls. Servers, such as application, directory, and database. And storage, such as NAS, SAN, block storage, and backup. Let's look at each of these in turn to discuss how they relate in the cloud, starting with location.

Now, depending on the size of your enterprise, you may only have one office and, as a result, you house all of your infrastructure on-site. However, many of you will probably have multiple data centres to help with resilience and availability. Public cloud providers do the same. They will have regions all over the globe, and within each of these regions, they'll have at least two data centres. These data centres will be in different geographic locations within that region, but close enough to provide interconnection between them using high-speed links for data transfer, aiding to high availability and resilience. Physical security. As we have already discovered, the public cloud is operated, managed, and maintained by the vendor.

As a result, the end-user has no access to the physical data centre where the resources are located. It is the vendor's responsibility to ensure it is implementing and achieving the correct certification regarding security. Public cloud vendors adhere to the most stringent of security controls, and for audit purposes, you can access all of their certifications online, if need be, to see their status. I've included links to the two leading public cloud vendors here. Mechanical and electrical infrastructure. Mechanical and electrical infrastructure, such as generators, UPS, computer (ph 02.05) and air conditioning units for cooling, fire suppression, etc., is situated at the data centre itself. As a result, the same rule applies, it's the vendor's responsibility to ensure they are implementing the correct capacity, resilience, and testing to ensure availability and uptime of their infrastructure. So, again, this burden is removed from the end user. Where roles and responsibilities begin to change is from this point on.

So, network infrastructure. Network infrastructure can be quite an extensive list of components. However, I'm going to cover some of the more common components and how they sit within the public cloud. Networking operates at the software level. There are no options to install a switch or a router. How it's achieved is beyond the scope of this lesson, but what is important is this. To a degree, you can implement controls, services, and configurations to simulate the same effects within your infrastructure that these devices provide. There are options to create a virtual network which can be segmented from others, allowing you to deploy compute, storage, database, and other resources as you require. These virtual networks are usually simple to set up, requiring just a few small details before it's created. Within AWS, these are classed as Virtual Private Clouds, whereas Microsoft Azure refers to these networks as an Azure Virtual Network or VNet.

From here, you can create different network segments, both public-facing and private. Routing and access controllers for security can also be configured dynamically for enhanced control. Once you have created your logical virtual network, and across different geographic regions if desired, you can then provision your server instances within different subnets. So, networking components such as switches, routers, and even firewalls have all been replaced with virtual networks and their configurable components. The back-end element of how these services work are, again, managed and maintained by the vendor, but architecting how your VPC is created is your responsibility, and it's your responsibility to ensure it's secure and not left vulnerable to attacks.

Servers. Depending on your vendor, servers are typically referred to as instances or virtual machines, VMs, but as there are different types of servers within a typical data centre, vendors provide different services to reflect them in the cloud. For example, providers offer servers that are specific to hosting databases and others are focused on heavy processing power that is needed to analyse large datasets. This is part of the benefit of the cloud. The vendors can replicate the functions that you use within your in-house data centre but with a lot more advantages. Storage. Storage is fantastic within the cloud as it's often regarded as unlimited, hugely scalable, and highly durable. As with compute power, there are different storage services depending on what sort of data you are using and where you intend to use it.

Within your data centre environment, you may have access to a storage area network. Public cloud providers can also provide block-level storage too, via their different services. This persistent block-level storage can be detached from one instance and reattached to another instance, again, all configured and deployed within a few clicks. There are other great storage services within the public cloud that cater for file-level storage and object storage, too. And between the leading public cloud vendors, such as AWS and Azure, they host a myriad of storage services to cater for different solutions. For more on this information, please visit these links.

Now, I've only skimmed the surface of the available services on offer within the public cloud and there are many other fantastic services that offer great solutions to requirements many organisations have within their IT estate. However, I just wanted to point out how your current data centre solutions and elements easily translate into a public cloud environment, whilst at the same time, carrying significant advantages and benefits, as discussed earlier in this lesson.

How Data Center architecture is Reflected in the Cloud | ITL3 A3.1 |

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