Hybrid Cloud For Dummies

Putting the Pieces Together

How do all the components of a cloud model fit together from an architectural perspective? Figure 13-1, which is from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (www.nist.gov/index.html ), depicts the various cloud services and how they relate to each other based on the three constituents. On the left side of this diagram, the cloud service consumer represents the types of consumers of cloud services. This includes all those consumers, such as the end user of a service, bringing a group of services together for internal and external users; and the business management that needs to have these services available as part of business strategy implementation. Within this category are the applications, middleware, infrastructure, and services that are built based on on-premises computing models. In addition, this model depicts the role of the cloud auditor. This organization provides the oversight either by an internal or an external group that makes sure that the consumer group meets its obligations.

Cloud service providers

Cloud service providers (see the center of Figure 13-1) represent all the models of cloud services that we discuss in Chapters 5–8. A cloud service provider might be a commercial company or a corporation that decides to become its own cloud service operator. Cloud providers may provide the underlying physical and virtualized resources needed to run various cloud services. They also may create the actual applications and business ...