What is a workload in the cloud?
For starters, it’s essential to know what you can expect out of Cloud Storage today.
So cloud storage has been around for about 13 years. And it’s dramatically different from even five years ago. When most people think about cloud storage, they think about either an object store you have to write to an API to do anything with it.
Or they think about Dropbox, a place to store files using a phone or something like that.
What is Cloud workload protection?
Before defining what is Cloud workload protection, let’s us understand the context of cloud computing.
What is Cloud Computing?
Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery service of computer system resources services like applications, data storage, physical or virtual servers, networking etc. through internet.
Working on ‘pay-as-you-go’ model, the difference between traditional on-premises IT and cloud computing paves way for a paradigm shift in the forms of:
- Cost
- Speed
- Global scalability
- Productivity
- Performance
- Reliability
- And data security
What are the 3 Cloud Computing Deployment models?
There is no one size fits all in cloud computing requirements. Cloud computing architecture, servers and storage capacity etc. are key elements to tailor requirements of your hardware, software and computing infrastructure.
There are various types of cloud computing types provided by a cloud computing provider
Private Cloud:
Private cloud is the cloud computing environment infrastructure that is limited to offer services, over the internet, to a single company.
In other words, private cloud is nothing but an internal network dedicated to a single business entity. A private cloud can be hosted within a business entity’s own data center or a third party cloud computing provider.
Public Cloud:
A public cloud is the computing services, provided by third party cloud computing providers, that are available to the public through the internet.
Hybrid Cloud:
As the meaning of hybrid indicates, a hybrid cloud computing is the solution that is the mixed version of on-premises datacenter aka private cloud and public cloud.
What are the 5 service models of Cloud Computing?
Infrastructure as a Service
Platform as a service
Software as a service
Mobile backend as a service
Function as a service (FaaS) or Server-less computing
Cloud storage is actually way more than that today. So think about a few available different types of storage.
There’s local storage inside of the actual server or VM, or bare-metal machine. There’s network block storage, which presents storage as volumes.
There’s cloud-based file storage, which presents storage with NFS or SMV types of interfaces. And then, of course, there is object storage and a subcategory called archive storage, which are API-based. So what’s all this stuff?
Again, it comes down to what you’re trying to do in the cloud. And again, you can do way more than you could
in the past for your applications. So typically, people have an enterprise application. They’ll have databases that they need to have back-end storage for. Or they’ll have more scale out-types of applications.
Again, what’s possible now is you can satisfy all the requirements that you would have had on-prem in the cloud. So enterprise applications, whether it’s your presentation tier or app server tier, typically require some storage amount.
It can be satisfied with block storage. They have some amount of database. That can be satisfied either local storage within the actual VMs or BMs.
And there’s typically some amount of file storage. The capabilities of these things are dramatically better than they used to be. So one of the critical myths around cloud storage is, oh, it can’t be the same level of performance that I get on-prem.
And that, in reality, is entirely untrue. You have local storage that can be operating well more than millions of IOPS, or IO operations per second. You have block storage that can handle hundreds of thousands of IOPS.
A second, this can satisfy almost any kind of workload now. The block storage is much richer. So on-prem, these used to be called storage area networks or unified storage. You can do almost all the things you can do in the cloud today. Things like point-in-time backups, things like clones, or even grouped clones, which Oracle Cloud provides.
You can do rapid copies of your application’s data to spin it up for either test instances or brand-new instances of the same application, again, almost in real-time. Notable types of capabilities that were only previously available on-prem or not even available. File storage, again, richer capabilities when it comes to snapshots. Things, again, you would expect out of an on-prem array. And again, also possible to have very high performance.
And then object storage–again, the very first type of cloud storage–has gotten better, has gotten even more scalable in terms of the amount of bandwidth they can serve, the size of objects they can handle.
And again, these are perfect for scale-out types of applications that can handle many, many parallel streams into the storage for things like video streaming, or social media, or commerce sites. So key points to remember.
Cloud storage is way more capable than it used to be. It performs, in many cases, equal or better to on-prem. Particularly with clouds like Oracle, where we’ve spent a lot of time trying to do that.
And the capabilities are equal or, in some cases, better than what’s available in on-prem storage arrays. And with the critical difference of being unlimited. So you’re not limited by the sizeof your physical infrastructure.
You have unlimited capacity available as well as unlimited things for backups, snapshots, et cetera.
All right, that’s cloud storage.
What workloads are moving to cloud?
Cloud workloads as a percentage of total data center workloads
What is Cloud Workload Protection?
What is a cloud workload protection platform?
Gartner Definition
Common Features of Cloud Workload Protection Platforms
Cloud gap analytics
