Cloud Activ8 Cloud
With hybrid enviroments, the next generation of Cloud deployment and management is well and truly here.
Forward-thinking organisations are already using it to steal a march on their competitors.
By creatively combining elements of Public Cloud, Private Cloud (on-premise or hosted, private or public) and even legacy IT Infrastructure, you can create a sophisticated system of interlinked Cloud Environments that’s tailored to the unique needs of your business.
The result is an unprecedented degree of business agility, with the freedom to move apps and data sets back and forth according to changing requirements, keeping you competitive and cost-effective while opening up a vast range of tangible, practical business benefits, some of which you may not have considered
AWS (Amazon Web Services)
The current market leader of the cloud computing platforms, Amazon Web Services is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. AWS is the most mature cloud platform offering a wide range of services to practically everyone: individual developers, large enterprises, and even governments.
AWS started its life as an internal cloud offering and by 2006, it had evolved into a publicly available cloud platform with services like Amazon S3 cloud storage and elastic compute cloud (EC2). AWS now offers more than 200 fully featured services to cater to any demand and serve millions of users.
AWS Compute
Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)
This service lets you rent virtual servers in the cloud. Most of them are virtual machines, ranging from tiny two vCPU and 0.5Gb of RAM to beefy 96-core machines with 384 Gb of RAM and physical dedicated servers with EC2. The service is designed for any workload.
Amazon ECR (Elastic Container Registry)
ECR is a highly available and high-performance container registry for easy storage, management, and deployment of your container images. Images can be private to your organization or shared worldwide. It works great with Amazon ECS, AWS Lambda, and AWS Fargate, enabling fast single-click deployments. It’s a fully managed service, and you pay only for the amount of data stored and data transferred over the internet.
Amazon ECS (EC2 Container Service)
ECS is a fully managed container orchestration service that enables you to run, scale, and secure Docker applications on Amazon EC2 and AWS Fargate. You can define multiple related containers and configure their various deployment parameters in task definitions.
Being a foundational pillar for critical Amazon services, it can natively integrate with Route 53, Secrets Manager, IAM, CloudWatch, and other services.
AWS Fargate
Fargate removes the need to manually provision and manage servers, freeing time to focus on building your application. It’s a serverless compute engine for containers that works both with ECS and EKS (Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service).
It automatically allocates the right amount of isolated compute resources for each container, so there is no additional cost for over-provisioning to handle more load. By design, running each application in isolation also improves its security.
AWS Lambda
Lambda is a serverless compute service that enables you to run your code on the AWS platform without worrying about provisioning, maintenance, and scaling the servers. Code gets automatically executed on incoming events or HTTP requests at any scale. Most popular languages like Javascript, C#, Java, Go, and Python are supported, and deployment is effortless.
AWS Database
Amazon DynamoDB
DynamoDB is a high-performance managed NoSQL database that supports both key-value and document store. It can handle more than 10 trillion requests per day, with peaks of more than 20 million requests per second.
Amazon ElastiCache
This service offers fully managed Redis and Memcached as high-throughput and low-latency in-memory data stores for your cloud applications. ElastiCache’s primary purpose is to boost web applications’ performance by caching mission-critical data on top of slower databases. It is also suitable for session storage, real-time analytics, and other tasks.
Amazon Aurora
Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible high-performance distributed relational database. Out of the box, it’s much faster than both MySQL and PostgreSQL and offers high security, availability, and reliability of traditional commercial databases. On top of that, it provides replication across three Availability Zones, point-in-time recovery, and continuous backup to Amazon S3.
Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service)
This service manages relational databases in the cloud. It takes care of hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups. Amazon RDS supports various database engines like Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, and MariaDB.
AWS Analytics
Amazon Kinesis
With Kinesis, you can analyse real-time data streams with low-latency at any scale. It enables applications to collect, buffer, and process streaming data as it arrives and react to it instantly instead of waiting hours for data to be collected before processing begins.
Amazon Redshift
Redshift provides a cost-effective way to build a data warehouse and run standard SQL queries against it. You can further analyze these results in various business intelligence tools to gain new insights from the underlying data.
Amazon Athena
Athena is a serverless solution to analyze large datasets in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. It’s fast, easy to use, and doesn’t require complex ETL processes to prepare your data before analysis. You pay only for the amount of data scanned when running each query.
AWS Glue
With serverless AWS Glue, data integration becomes much more comfortable. It helps discover and extract data from multiple sources, prepare this data for use, and organize it into databases, data warehouses, and data lakes for further analysis by specialized tools and custom applications.
AWS Networks & CDN
Amazon Route 53
Route 53 is an advanced, highly available, and scalable DNS Service. Besides simple IP lookups, it has sophisticated routing types like GeoDNS, Geo-proximity, and Latency Based Routing. Together with health checks and DNS failover, this enables different fault-tolerant low-latency architectures configurable with a simple visual editor.
Amazon CloudFront
CloudFront is a fast and secure programmable content delivery network (CDN) that caches your content and APIs on globally scaled edge locations for more rapid responses. It also offers protection against multiple types of attacks, including network, transport, and application-layer DDoS attacks. CloudFront is cost-effective and deeply integrated with other AWS services like S3, EC2, Route 53, and Elastic Load Balancing.
Amazon API Gateway
API Gateway makes it easy to create, publish, monitor, and secure RESTful and WebSocket APIs. It handles traffic management, CORS, authorization and access control, throttling, monitoring, and API version management. API Gateway can process hundreds of thousands of concurrent API calls. It’s a fully managed service, and you pay only for the API calls your application receives and the amount of outgoing traffic.
AWS Elastic Load Balancing
Elastic Load Balancing distributes incoming application traffic across multiple servers, containers, or Lambda functions. It enables the application to handle more concurrent requests without affecting response time. Multiple request handlers are crucial to make the application highly available, reliable, and fault-tolerant.
Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud)
With Amazon VPC, you can create logically isolated virtual networks inside AWS. You have full control over the configuration of the network, its subnets, and routing tables. It’s possible to create a public-facing subnet with internet access for your web servers while keeping most of the backend infrastructure in a private subnet with no internet connection, making it much more secure.
AWS Storage
AWS CloudFormation
CloudFormation enables you to describe your desired resources and their dependencies with a code template as a single stack. You can provision, manage, update, and delete these stacks as single units without managing underlying resources individually.
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
Amazon S3 is a generic object storage service designed for incredible durability, high scalability, availability, security, and performance. It has various storage classes for different use cases. S3 automatically stores copies of objects across multiple systems. It offers a fine-grained access control system and auditing capabilities for compliance. Using Amazon Athena, you can analyze data in S3 at any scale with simple SQL queries.
Amazon S3 Glacier
For data archiving and long-term backups at extremely low-cost, Amazon offers S3 Glacier with extreme durability. There are three options for access to archives. Expedited retrievals typically return data in 1-5 minutes, standard generally complete in 3-5 hours, while the cheapest bulk retrievals take 5-12 hours to get large amounts of data.
Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Storage)
EBS is generic long-term high-performance block storage for EC2 instances. It’s designed for both throughput and transactional workloads and can scale to petabytes of data. You can choose different storage types with various throughput and latency suitable for your needs. The EBS replicates volumes within the Availability Zone, and you can use EBS Snapshots to backup your volumes to S3.
Amazon EFS (Elastic File System)
Amazon Elastic File System is a fully managed scalable elastic NFS. It grows and shrinks automatically, eliminating the need to provision and manually manage capacity. EFS is designed to provide massively parallel shared access to thousands of EC2 instances with a high level of aggregate throughput and IOPS, maintaining consistent latency.
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure is the second-largest cloud platform. Debuting in 2010, Azure has evolved into a cloud platform with more than 200 products and services. Today, it is among the fastest-growing cloud platforms.
Azure provides a wide array of services tailored particularly for Microsoft-centric enterprises—making the switch to a cloud or a hybrid-cloud environment smooth for many organizations. In use by more than 95% of Fortune 500 companies, Microsoft Azure has a proven track record.
Compute
Cloud computing is essentially leasing out computational resources that may be too expensive or cumbersome to manage on premises, from a wide distribution network of managed data centers. Virtual Machines spin up Windows and Linux virtual operating systems that share physical resources, but are completely self contained environments that users can remotely access to deploy large scale workloads.
If you don't want to worry about the operating system and want to completely hand over management of the hosting environment to Azure, simply deploy an application on App Service. This service allows you to focus on your code; deploy a .NET, Python, Java, Ruby, PHP or NodeJS application in a few clicks and have it running on the cloud in no time (giving a higher level of abstraction, albeit lesser control, than VMs).
Serverless computing is all the rage these days, and along with AWS and Google, Azure has thrown its hat in the ring with Azure Functions. While technically not server-less, Functions abstracts away interaction with the actual web app server and lets users deploy a piece of programming logic, wrapped in a function and triggered by an event such as a database entry or a specific time of day.
Storage
If you're deploying applications to the cloud, you'll need persistent data storage. Azure Blob Storage allows scalable storage for objects and files and provides an SDK to easily access them. Blob storage is a great trigger for Azure Functions, where uploading a file can automatically run your custom logic in the cloud (for example, if you wanted to run OCR on a file as soon as it's uploaded to a storage container). However, if you wanted to mount a filesystem as a native share on a virtual machine, use Azure Files instead. Azure Archive Storage allows businesses to store terabytes of archived data that will rarely be accessed, at the fraction of the cost of regular file storage. This is great for backups, medical history, audit and compliance data, or for migrating decades of magnetic tape storage to the cloud. Finally, use Azure Data Lake Storage to store both structured and unstructured data as-is and run high performance analytics workloads at scale, with support for the most common analytics frameworks.
Database
Developers need databases to store structured data, like application state and user data. Azure offers a range of managed SQL and NoSQL database solutions. Azure SQL is a suite of services that offer a cloud based relational database experience for different use cases. SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines creates an entire operating system environment running the popular Microsoft Relational Database Management System, allowing seamless migration of on premises SQL workloads to the cloud. Azure SQL Database abstracts away resource management and scalability to let developers focus on building applications. Finally, Azure SQL Edge is an architecture agnostic, containerized database that runs on IoT and edge devices with native support for streaming and time series data, so developers can perform real-time analytics on a myriad of data captured by sensors.
Containers
When you develop an application, you want to be able to run it in any environment. Containers offer the ability to ship the app within an image of its environment configurations, allowing faster and more flexible deployment than on VMs. Container Instances provides running instances of a virtualized operating system running your application and managing environment variables, configuration and networking itself. The aforementioned configurations, networking, operating system and other features of the container are described in a blueprint called an image, and these images are usually stored on online repositories, like Docker Hub. Container Registry is Azure’s private repository for Docker and Open Container Initiative images. Managing containers can be tricky, especially if you’ve deployed a number of microservices, each running as a stand alone container. Kubernetes is an open source container orchestration tool that manages container scaling, state management, health and deployment. Azure Kubernetes Service is a fully managed, serverless Kubernetes experience on the cloud that leverages Azure’s enterprise grade security and governance.
Artificial Intelligence
Developing AI applications is challenging. Training sophisticated machine learning models requires incredibly large, mostly labelled datasets that are difficult to acquire, and high performance computing that uses powerful and expensive graphics processing units. Researchers at Azure have developed ML models for common AI use cases using public and proprietary datasets and exposed APIs for developers to transform their applications and processes with AI, without training models from scratch.
Azure Cognitive Services is a family of AI services across vision, speech, language and decision support. Computer Vision labels everyday objects and links them to 10,000 ontology concepts, reads signs and text using optical character recognition and analyzes spatial movement in images and videos. If your image analysis tasks are specific to an industry or domain, such as medical image analysis or using vision in optimizing manufacturing, use Custom Vision.
Cognitive services also offer a range of products for natural language processing. Language Understanding or LUIS can extract key user goals and intentions, as well as entities, from natural language input. This can be combined with QnA Maker, a conversational agent that can answer questions based on FAQs and similar knowledge bases, to build simple chatbots. Translator uses neural machine translation to translate text and documents (with ability to preserve original document format) in 90 supported languages.
Dev Tools, Management, Security and Networking
Here are a few services that make the overall Azure experience so amazing. Every Azure resource automatically generates metrics and logs. Azure Monitor collects, analyzes and acts on this data to ensure availability, maximize performance and proactively detect problems. Azure Active Directory is Azure’s cloud Identity Access Management system. Azure AD provides single sign on for your apps and governs access by ensuring the right people have access to the right resources. Developing applications involves calls to numerous APIs and therefore secret and key management can get cumbersome. Key Vault simplifies this process by providing a single location to store all secrets and an SDK to easily access them, ensuring data protection and compliance. The advantage of deploying applications on the cloud as opposed to on premises, is the ability to autoscale on demand and have your data always available. Azure Load Balancer evenly distributes incoming network traffic to multiple instances of your application, while Content Delivery Network caches your resources in multiple geographies intelligently, to reduce load times and save bandwidth.
