The evolution of computing - Azure Tutorial

Let's start off with a little history of the evolution of cloud computing. And really what we're talking about here is how did we get here? How did we get to cloud computing from where we used to be many, many years back? So let's start off that tour looking at on-premises. And on-premises means you're hosting your data and your infrastructure and everything in your own data center that's on-premises with you. So there's some benefits to this. Obviously, first of all, you control and own everything. All of the data is yours in your data center, all the infrastructure is owned by you, which means you have total control over all of those things. You don't have to deal with a decision made by someone else. All of the decisions are your own. And of course, playing into that is you have better regulatory compliance or easier regulatory compliance. And when I say regulatory compliance, I'm talking about regulations that could be imposed by a country or the region where you operate, but it could also be by the nature of the business that you're in. So for example, a healthcare business has certain regulations they have to comply with because of the fact that they deal with sensitive health care information. So if you're hosting on-premises, it becomes very easy to comply with those things because everything's in your control. Also, you might have some specialized deployments. That could be older legacy systems or things that are very particular in the way they're configured, and so you want to make sure that you have all the control with that. and obviously there's a benefit if everything is inside your own data center as far as controlling that specialized deployment, making sure everything is deployed in the correct way. Now there are also drawbacks to being on-premises. One is high costs, and probably this is the biggest drawback to having everything on-premises, and we're talking about not just the cost, the initial cost of having to buy all the infrastructure, and by the way when we talk about infrastructure. We're not just talking about computers, we're also talking about server racks, networking appliances, cabling, backup power supplies, all of the things that you need to host a modern data center. It's also maintaining those things, which is like replacement parts and things like that, but it's also IT staff. You know, an IT staff to maintain equipment like that is It's one of your biggest expenses. And so that's one of the drawbacks. Certainly not as efficient in utilization. It's not agile. What I mean by that is, if you want to add additional capability, like you want to add more machines, you can't do that really quickly. You've got to order those and get them configured and get them integrated into your data center. It's not something you can do very quickly. And so for that reason, it requires you to have long-term accurate planning of what your needs are going to be. If you make a decision this morning that by this afternoon, you need to have double the capacity of computers, you're just out of luck if you're in an on-premise environment. It's going to take you way longer than that to double your capacity. You've got to make sure that you're accurately planning long-term. Now, notice that the title of this slide is on-premises versus hosted data centers. Some of these drawbacks, you can kind of lessen the bite of them a bit by going to a hosted data center. And a hosted data center simply means that it's still all of your stuff, but you're actually having it hosted by someone else in their data center. And there's some benefits to doing that. First of all, you offload all the power, the cooling, everything else that's required to keep that data center running effectively, you're offloading that to someone else. which would be the person who actually owns and operates that datacenter. Also, obviously, you don't have a datacenter building, so you get rid of that real estate requirement on you. Of course, that's a big expense, not only upfront expense, but also to maintain that building. You offload that, that's a benefit. A big one is you offload physical security, physical security of your systems and your data. If you're hosting data that is sensitive for some reason, maybe it's sensitive because of regulatory reasons, or maybe it's just your intellectual property for your business, and so it's very valuable to you. You want to make sure that that is secure from a physical point of view, so that someone can't physically get access to those systems. If you're using a hosted data center, you're offloading that to the company that runs that hosted data center. That's a good benefit. Now, there are also drawbacks. There are pluses and minuses to everything, but there's some pretty big drawbacks to hosted datacenters. Number 1, costs. Certainly, you're offloading some of these things to another company which is convenient, but you have to pay them for that load that they're taking off of you. You have to rent the datacenter, you have to rent the equipment, You have to pay them to maintain them and all of those types of things. And so you could actually end up spending a lot of money. And the other drawback from the cost perspective is that if you're on premises and you have a data center, at least you have an asset there that belongs to your company that has value. But if you're hosting that in a hosted data center, you lose that. So it's a give and take. also maintenance and planning, because you're offloading that to the people that run the hosted data center. And so they are planning infrastructure stuff. They may make decisions about when to reboot machines and that kind of thing that might not comply with what you would like. And it's not agile. This kind of goes along with the same drawback that you have with on-premises. Even if you want to add additional capability within a hosted datacenter, you still have to add that additional capability over the long-term. You can't immediately double the size of your capacity, for example. Those are drawbacks of a hosted datacenter. Now, when we think about the evolution of Cloud computing, we obviously have to talk about how does the math change once we go to cloud computing versus on-premises or a hosted data center. The real big benefits of cloud computing are, it's agile, it's fast, it's cost-effective. There are actually quite a few more benefits that we'll talk about as we go further along in this course. But for the nature of comparing it to on-premises and hosted data centers, these are where you're really going to see that value proposition. Let's look at the benefits. no capital hardware costs, capital costs meaning that upfront cost for all of that infrastructure. You don't have that in a Cloud environment. Your Cloud provider already has that infrastructure in place. You just use what they already have. Notice that one of the things that I was pointing out as a drawback of both on-premises and hosted data centers is they're not agile. The Cloud is agile. What that means is you can very easily add additional capability, whether that is maybe something as low level as more cores in a CPU or double the number of virtual machines. You can do this very quickly in the cloud. Also, there's a lot of redundancy built in here, and that's because normally your cloud provider has features that are available to you that allow you to make duplicate copies of your deployments in multiple places. Now, that could be duplicate VMs in multiple places. So if one of them goes out, you're covered because you've got a duplicate somewhere else. But it's also redundancy of your data. So as you're storing data in the Cloud, you can make sure that you have multiple copies of your data in multiple places. We're going to talk quite a bit more about not only what the true benefit of that is, but how you can implement that in Azure as we get further along in this course. Then of course, global. A lot of companies nowadays are global companies. We're no longer in this world where people are serving people in a very small geographic area. Certainly, there are small companies that do that, but a lot of companies have global presence, even small companies. When you're going with a Cloud provider, you're working with a provider that has a global presence all across the globe. That's really important when it comes to things like speed and ease of use. If your company is based in the United States and you have users who are accessing your deployment from Europe, it makes a lot more sense if they're accessing your deployment on servers that are physically located in Europe, because that's going to be way faster for them. And so you have that benefit when you're talking about cloud computing. Now, like I said, there are pluses and minuses to everything, and there's some drawbacks to the cloud. First of all, it's a learning curve. It's a different, it's a paradigm shift. It's a different system. It's a different world. And the way that you think about deploying your things into the cloud differs from the way that you think about deploying them on-premises. And after all, that's one of the reasons why you're taking this course. Also, there are possible complexities and really this falls into play mostly when you're dealing with trying to integrate things that are in the cloud with things that are on-premises or something like that. Sometimes when you have complicated system configuration like that, you might have some complexities to deal with. Now, cloud providers give you a lot of services and tools that make that way easier than it could be, but it still does introduce some complexity. So let's look at some everyday cloud examples, because you know there are a lot of uses of the cloud that people really don't think about all the time. Mostly when we think about cloud nowadays, people are thinking about big data centers and virtual machines hosted someplace out in the ether somewhere. It's actually way more than that. For example, e-mail providers such as Outlook.com or Gmail, or what we used to have Hotmail. There are all these e-mail providers that are all actually Cloud services. And so we think about the way that we used to use e-mail, you'd have to do quite a bit of configuration to get e-mail hosted for you. Now, all of that is very easy in the cloud. Another one is content consumption and all of us pretty much do this, right? Last night I was sitting down in my living room and I was watching something on Netflix. And what I was doing at that moment was using a cloud service. And you think about all of these benefits that we talk about when it comes to the cloud, obviously Netflix as a company is benefiting from those things. So no matter where I am in the world, I can access systems that are close to me so that I can have a very good streaming experience with Netflix. Also, disk space for days. Boy, I can remember a very long time ago when I was in the hotel business and my boss bought me a new hard drive. And I was so excited because I had 90 megabytes of hard drive space. Yes, I said megabytes. And I was thinking, I'm never going to be able to fill that up. Well, it is now many years after that. And of course, we have figured out all kinds of ways to use this space. The problem is having like a hard drive in your house is not very safe. If something happens to that hard drive, well, you could be in trouble. You could lose your data. The cloud allows us to have cloud solutions with disk space in enormous amounts available for relatively low cost. So for example, I'm a Microsoft 365 subscriber. I have the family plan. So every one of my family gets Microsoft Office through that plan, but they also get one terabyte of OneDrive disk space in the cloud. And I find myself thinking, wow, one terabyte. I'll never fill all that up. And it reminds me of that 90 megabyte comment that I made many, many years ago. There will be a time where we will fill up one terabyte of space fairly easily, but the Cloud allows us to have disk space that is easily grows with us and is relatively inexpensive. Then of course, business use. I mean, a lot of companies are utilizing the Cloud for many deployments for many different reasons, and we're going to look at a lot of those in much more detail as we go further along in this course.