Table of Contents
Introduction
Hello everyone, I'm Gene. If you've ever met any friends from the Cloud Native Taiwan User Group, you've probably encountered me. This time, as a community member, I'm thrilled to introduce you to the first-ever Cloud Native Taiwan User Group event, where we'll dive into... From Bare Metal to Cloud – 30 Days Teaching You Cloud the topic.
This session will begin with fundamental cloud concepts, guiding you step by step from basic understanding to deeper knowledge of cloud architecture, deployment models, and finally exploring Kubernetes’ structure and how to deploy it on OpenStack.
In short, this session will walk participants through hands-on operations, starting from a simple Linux server, step by step, building their own private cloud.
Cloud Definition
Typically, cloud deployments are based on The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing to explain
NIST defines cloud computing in three different directions, categorized as:
- Essential Characteristics
- Service Model
- Deployment Model
Essential Characteristics
There are five essential characteristics of cloud computing, which represent its core concepts. These include:
On-Demand Self-Service
Consumers can on-demand access resources according to their needs, without requiring constant interaction with service providers to obtain network, storage, or computing resources.
Broad Network Access
Cloud services are available on-demand and can be accessed instantly, regardless of the endpoint used; they can be provisioned through a standardized interface.
Resource Pooling
Cloud resources are shared among multiple users, and cloud providers achieve isolation between users through mechanisms like multi-tenancy. While users are isolated at the surface level, they actually share the underlying network, computing, and storage resources.
Rapid Elasticity
Users can provision or deprovision resources on demand, and for consumers, this capability seems virtually unlimited, enabling rapid scaling of infrastructure.
Measured Service
In cloud computing, various aspects of cloud services—such as storage space, computing resources, bandwidth, and user account counts—are measurable and controllable within certain limits. Resource usage can be monitored, controlled, and reported to provide transparency into service consumption for both providers and consumers.
These are the five essential characteristics of cloud computing.
Summary
This article has introduced the five essential characteristics of cloud services. Since each of these definitions is abstract, readers are encouraged to reflect on their own experiences with cloud services to determine whether these services match the described traits.
Tomorrow, we will cover the cloud service models—stay tuned!
Copyright Notice: All articles in this blog are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 unless otherwise stated.