Private and hybrid clouds with Azure

While the entire world is focused on the usual public clouds the private ones are behind the scene. We’re going to look into that to figure out the purpose of usage.

Private cloud is a computing services provider for a particular organization or business, also called an internal or corporate cloud. Basically, it offers high-level security of the organization's sensitive data. Since the private cloud is hosted on-premise the access might be shared within the internal network and data is stored on the corporate hardware.

However, besides the high level of security it has the following benefits:

1. Flexibility, you can customize the environment to your personal needs
2. Control, resources are only used by your organization and not shared with others
3. Scalability, you don’t need to care about scaling specific to the web services the cloud does that instead.

Probably the disadvantage of the private cloud is maintenance. IT staff have to serve the hardware to provide a high level of durability. Meanwhile, it requires much effort only in the early stage, then keeps an eye on it. Furthermore, while the private cloud is limited by the resources of your organization, hybrid starts using public computing power once local runs out.

Hybrid cloud is a combination of public and private clouds. It allows the sharing of data and applications between them in order to fulfill the scalability requirement. Organizations gain the flexibility and computing power of the public cloud for basic and non-sensitive computing tasks while keeping business-critical applications and data on-premises, safely behind a company firewall.

The primary benefit is resource allocation. For instance, if your marketing department had shared a popular topic on the web then the following 3 days the number of visitors increased drastically you can eliminate the peak by extending resources over the public cloud. In this case, you will pay money only for used computing power, and no need to extend the hardware in the local datacenter. It’s called a cloud bursting.

The following image illustrates several of the cloud computing concepts:

As your resources move from on-premises to off-premises, your costs are reduced, and your administration requirements decrease.

Azure Stack

Why is the Microsoft based platform? Azure is the first cloud platform that started providing such a service.

Leveraging the power of cloud computing, it provides such services as AI and IoT devices management, which may help you to automate and improve the process of your organization. Azure Stack is a Microsoft implementation of private and hybrid cloud. It’s used in the following industries: Financial Services, Government, Manufacturing, Retail, Energy, Health.

Benefits:

1. It helps to bring the power of the cloud to areas with limited or no connectivity. Process data and get the actual results before it is sent to the cloud
2. Organizations can handle data in their own data centers to keep them secure and accessible
3. It modernizes the organization's infrastructure providing high-end digital services.

Check out this video of how’s one of the biggest aerospace manufacturer uses the Azure Stack: Airbus transforms aerospace with Microsoft Azure Stack

Azure Stack products:

1. Edge - cloud-based solution installed on the appliance, which could work without the internet connection. For instance, it checks your luggage in an airport for some prohibited items. Since it should work without the latency to avoid a queue during the security check, it requires a particular installation with an AI setup
2. HCI - hybrid cloud
3. Hub - run cloud computing solutions on your on-premises environment.

How much?

1. Azure Stack Edge charges you as a monthly subscription cost + device shipping
2. Azure Stack Hub offers pay-as-you-use pricing (no hardware included)
3. Azure Stack HCI isn't released yet.

Summary

Although private and hybrid clouds haven’t gained so much attention yet. It's certainly worth learning this approach to be aware of cloud computing technologies on-premise. Since infrastructure expenses don’t have a privilege in front of data privacy and security for such enormous enterprise areas as banking and manufacturing, they could disregard the price. Even though high-level security is a gold standard nowadays, not every business requires private or hybrid clouds, while the public are good enough for most of them.

Author: Ilya Bedritskiy  .NET developer at UKAD