Cloud computing’s target audience

Cloud computing can be different things to different people depending on their perspective and their role or function. A business leader will have one idea of what cloud computing needs to deliver, which will be very different from the technology leader and very different from a developer, a database admin, or a data scientist. They all have other wants and needs, and so cloud computing as a model almost has to be all things to all people.

Azure provides the following high-level categorization of services to a business:

• Hosted infrastructure platform
• Application development platform
• Data and analytics platform
• Monitoring and management platform
• Hybrid and multi-cloud control plane platform
• Security operations platform
• Identity and compliance platform

With regard to Azure, as Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, these different functions are very well catered for, making it relevant from all perspectives.

Azure is the only hybrid-consistent platform, combining Azure as the public cloud platform with Azure Stack as the private cloud platform, while operating with other cloud platform providers and on-premises resources through Azure Arc.

This section looked at the audience of cloud computing and the categorization of services available to a business. In the next section, we look at the mindset of the cloud computing audience compared to traditional computing’s audience; this is a shift in people, process, and culture, which is much harder to achieve than the adoption of technology.

Cloud computing mindset

The biggest challenge to cloud adoption is not technology but changing the mindset and culture within an organization. We have seen the same thing happening with DevOps over the years. The realization over time has been that DevOps is not a technology or a job title but a cultural shift in a people and process model. Terms such as CapEx and OpEx referenced in the following section will be explained later in this chapter.