From Bare Metal to Cloud: Cloud Definition 1

Table of Contents

Introduction

Hi everyone, I'm Gene. If you've ever participated in the Cloud Native Taiwan User Group, you've probably heard of me. I've been encouraged by community members to participate in the Ironman competition for the first time, and I will be using From Bare Metal to Cloud — Building Your Own Cloud in 30 Days as the topic.

This series will start with an introduction to cloud concepts, guiding readers through the fundamentals, then moving into OpenStack architecture and deployment methods, and finally covering Kubernetes architecture and how to deploy Kubernetes on OpenStack.
Overall, this topic will guide learners step-by-step from a simple Linux machine to building their own private cloud.

Cloud Definition

The definition of cloud computing is usually based on The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing for explanation.

NIST defines cloud computing from three different perspectives:

Essential Characteristics
Service Models
Deployment Models

Essential Characteristics

There are five essential characteristics of cloud computing, which are also its core concepts. These include:

On-demand Self-service

Consumers can provision computing capabilities, such as network, storage, and server time, as needed automatically without requiring human interaction with the service provider.

Broad Network Access

Cloud services are available over the network and can be accessed through standard mechanisms regardless of the user's device.

Resource Pooling

Cloud service resources are shared among all customers/users, while cloud providers isolate each user through methods like multi-tenancy. Users are isolated at the virtual level but physically share the entire network, computing, and storage resources.

Rapid Elasticity

Users can flexibly scale resource usage up or down based on demand. To the consumer, this capability appears infinite, allowing for rapid scaling.

Measured Service

In measured services, various levels of cloud services can be monitored to a certain degree, such as storage space, computing resources, bandwidth, and the number of user accounts. Resource usage can be monitored, controlled, and reported, providing transparent usage information for both providers and consumers.

These are the five essential characteristics of cloud computing.

Summary

We have introduced the five essential characteristics of cloud services. Since these definitions are somewhat abstract, you can try referencing cloud services you have used and consider whether they meet these characteristics.

Tomorrow, we will introduce cloud service models. Stay tuned!