Cloud computing operations model

Elastic, scalable, agile, fault-tolerant, highly available, and disaster recovery are all terminology associated with cloud computing, adding value, and benefiting an organization’s operational model.

These inherent and defining characteristics allow a workload deployed into a cloud computing environment to become highly available and scale in and out (both vertically and horizontally), which maps closely to demand. This ability to be elastic in nature allows the agility to provide a highly effective operations and economics model to flex with the changing demands of a business.

By optimizing running hours and right-sizing resources in line with demand and changing requirements, the switch to an OpEx system of paying as you use things (also known as a consumption-based system) allows controlled and monitored spending of computing resources without the overcommit of a traditional CapEx computing cost model of deploying hardware in on-premises facilities.

The following figure outlines the computing resources demand model and shows the implications of actual demand against implemented resources based on predicted demand:

Figure 2.5 – Cloud computing resource demand model

In this illustration, the traditional computing mindset from the last section can be seen. This traditional computing mindset means over-provisioning to provide resources to meet predicted demand; many resources are underutilized. When demand exceeds the predicted demand, there are no resources available; there is no burst capacity or scale to meet the demand. To compound things further, this demand has dropped off by the time these extra resources have been implemented and they are no longer needed.

With the cloud computing mindset, resource utilization can be tracked and then right-sized to demand, meaning there is never a case where it is required to over-provision and pay for more resources than are needed.

This section introduced the cloud computing operations model. The following section will look closer at the characteristics of cloud computing that deliver the benefits and value over the traditional computing model.