Five Principles for Deploying and Managing Linux in the Cloud

Chapter 1. Introduction

Cloud computing is the provisioning and maintaining of computing services, such as servers, networking, and storage, over the internet. A cloud provider supplies various computing resources and services, and it charges users based on their actual usage of those resources and services, just as a utility, such as an electricity provider does.

A succinct definition of cloud provisioning is: a computing model that remotely provisions scalable and measured computing resources and services.

Cost effectiveness and speedy provisioning of computing infrastructure and services are two important benefits of running your computing workloads in the cloud rather than in your own datacenter. Cloud computing is a different paradigm from the historical way of running private datacenters, although traditional datacenters and cloud computing can coexist. The cloud provider may provide an organization just the computing infrastructure, or it may offer additional services that run on top of the infrastructure, such as big data and analytics.

Note

An IT resource can be a physical or virtual server, software programs, services, storage, or network devices.

A cloud provider owns the computing resources and is responsible for making those cloud resources and services available to cloud consumers, according to previously agreed-upon Service Level Agreements (SLAs). The cloud provider provisions and manages the compute resources and owns the resources that it leases to the cloud ...