Clouds and Services
This book’s primary focus is on Hyper-V, but the big technology investment area today
is around various types of clouds and various types of capabilities offered “as a
Service.” I focus on several of these throughout the book, but in this section I provide
a high-level summary of the types of clouds and “as a Service” offerings commonly
seen, so they will make sense as I discuss their principles and use in later chapters.
There are two primary types of clouds: private and public. Virtualization focuses on
services related to compute, such as creating, configuring, and running the virtual
machines, but it does not focus on the storage or network fabrics that are major pieces
of the datacenter. Virtualization does not help abstract the underlying resources from
how they may be provisioned, and quotas to create resources are allocated to business
units and users. Virtualization does not provide self-service capabilities and workflows
to the clients. Cloud services enable this by providing rich management technologies
that build on the virtualization foundation and enable intuitive, scalable, and
controlled services that can be offered beyond just the IT team. With cloud services,
different resources from the datacenter can be grouped together and offered to
different groups of users with well-defined capabilities and capacity. There are many
more benefits, and I go into more detail throughout this book.
Cloud services that are offered using an organization’s internal resources are known
as private clouds. Cloud services that are offered external to the organization, such as
from a hosting partner or even solutions such as Microsoft Windows Azure, are called
public clouds.
Within these clouds, different types of services can be offered, and typically these are
seen from public cloud providers. There is, however, a movement of these types of
services being offered in an organization’s private cloud to its various business units,
especially IaaS. There are three primary types of services: infrastructure as a service
(IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS). For each type,
the responsibilities of the nine major layers of management vary between the vendor
of the service and the client (you). Figure 1.14 shows the three types of service and a
complete on-premises solution.