Essential Characteristics
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Video Transcription
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>> In this video,
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we're going to continue our journey in domain 1,
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which is Cloud computing concepts and architecture.
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We're going to take a look at the NIST model
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for defining Cloud.
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Specifically, we're going to look at
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the five essential characteristics
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that the NIST model defines.
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Then you may recall we looked at
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both the NIST definition in
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the prior lesson as well as the ISO definition.
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The ISO has a sixth essential characteristic,
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and we're going to touch on what that is as well.
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Here we have a visual depiction of the NIST model,
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essential characteristics,
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service models, deployment models.
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The latter two we're going to
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>> cover in subsequent videos,
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>> but in this video, we're focusing on
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that very top square area.
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Let's talk about resource pooling.
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This is where we have that common physical infrastructure
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that's been abstracted through virtualization,
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and gets allocated to many different tenants.
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The physical aspects really are not made
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directly apparent to the Cloud user themselves.
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They have no control over the exact location,
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but they have control over the logical amounts of
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compute of storage and so forth that
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get provisioned to them and provided,
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and that control is given to them through self-service.
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They don't need to directly
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interact with the Cloud administrator,
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the individuals or organization
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that maintains the physical infrastructure
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itself when they want to get
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resources in that pool allocated to them.
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It's usually done through some a web portal
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or an automation.
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This is also referred to as the Cloud management plane.
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We're going to be covering that quite in depth
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in subsequent lessons of this course.
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[NOISE] Moving forward, broad network access,
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this is another key characteristic of Cloud computing.
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Access through standard clients.
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Computers, desktops, laptops,
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mobile devices,
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traditional or Cloud-based software services.
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They're available over the network
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because physical access,
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especially when you're using a public Cloud provider,
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is definitely not feasible.
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Even when you have a private Cloud,
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if you have a distributed company,
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having people walk into the server room
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is not really a good idea.
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Generally, that's going to be quite locked
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down from a security perspective,
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you want access to the physical facilities
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themselves to be minimized
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to a select few of individuals
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who have a reason for doing that.
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Rapid elasticity.
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This is the ability to scale up,
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scale out, or do a little bit of both.
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By scale up, I mean,
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get a more powerful machine,
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more CPU, more RAM.
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Scale out, I mean,
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have higher quantity of machines,
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which could certainly be
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very powerful machines in their own right,
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but they're two different approaches,
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and then of course there's both.
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In Cloud computing,
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the concept of scaling out is a big paradigm around Cloud
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native to really make sure you have
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that resiliency and failover within your applications.
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You don't have to wait for procurement
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to know physical provisioning of a new server,
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or even let's say you
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have a bunch of virtual machines in place,
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but you're managing
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the underlying resource pools yourself,
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there will become a point where you hit that limit of
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the resource pool just
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can't accommodate another virtual machines.
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You have to wait until you get
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additional physical resources to add into that pool,
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go through the provisioning and procurement process.
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With Cloud, your ability to scale out
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becomes not infinite in a true and precise sense,
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but the cloud providers,
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especially the big ones,
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have a whole lot of capacity and they're creating
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some very large pools that they're aggregating
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and distributing across to the various tenants.
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The capacity planning aspect of it,
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instead of being something you need to consider,
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which would be in the case you have
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your own virtual machine farm that
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gets outsourced to the actual Cloud provider,
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and they're doing the capacity planning,
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not just for you yourself,
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but for all the tenants that are
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using that shared resource pool.
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Measured service. Just like the electricity analogy,
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you're going to get your electricity bill
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based on how much you use.
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With the Cloud world,
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this is a key characteristic,
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is being able to have the measure of the service.
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The tenants only use what's allocated to them,
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but they have fees
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associated and calculated based
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on what they do use in fact,
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so this is the utility computing is
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another keyword that you're going to
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want to understand when you're
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going and taking your CCSK.
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The fifth characteristic of
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Cloud computing is on-demand self-service.
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Being able to allocate those resources from
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that pool without human interaction.
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This is often done with
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the Cloud management plan that we
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mentioned a few minutes ago.
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You have a nice interface with programmatic APIs,
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ways to do this without
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having to make that call down to the data center.
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A consumer basically can
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unilaterally provision the computing capabilities.
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This includes things like server allocation,
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memory, CPU, network storage, all that elasticity.
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Being able to do that through a more programmatic means,
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or at least through
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simple interaction with a web portal type interface,
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is the fifth characteristic
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defining on-demand self-service.
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Rolling this out, we're going to examine
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the sixth essential characteristic
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of cloud computing according to the ISO model.
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It's multi-tenancy.
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You have a bunch of resources,
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they're being used by lots of different people.
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You're segregating and you're isolating them,
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what are the aspects relative to
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multi-tenancy that drive this characteristic?
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Starting at the top circle
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here, policy driven enforcement.
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By that we're talking about,
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the Cloud provider and Cloud consumers,
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they define how their environment
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should look using policies.
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These can be implemented in
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the user interface or directly through
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policies enforced through some a formal policy language.
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A lot of the Cloud providers,
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especially public Cloud providers,
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they allow you to create policies,
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security policies, or just usage limitation policies.
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You've provided these end users with
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the ability to self provision machines.
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Well, maybe you and your company,
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you want to make a provision in there or
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create a policy rather that is going
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to prevent these individuals from spinning up
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some super compute machine with
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32 cores and terabyte of RAM,
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which is going to create an extensive bill for you.
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Policies allow you to
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delegate and provide that self-service,
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but also create some guardrails to prevent people
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from creating exuberantly large bills,
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or from creating insecure setups
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and configurations that could
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expose you and your company.
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We'll talk about these more as we proceed.
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Within that, customers they run
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their own segment of the Cloud.
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The multi-tenant environment,
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the provider themselves sanctions
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off and isolates the different tenants themselves.
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Segmentation is how the provider divides
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up the Cloud among those different tenants.
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Isolation is the next element
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and that's where the consumers, in one segment,
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they shouldn't be able to see
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anything running in a different segment,
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and this is a key control of
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the multi-tenant characteristic of Cloud computing.
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Computers in one segment should never see or be
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able to interact with something
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running in a different segment.
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Governance is an overall management model of the Cloud,
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from contacts and service levels to policies and a lot of
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other characteristics that are
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enforcement mechanisms of governance.
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We will talk about those in
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subsequent videos and lessons as well.
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Service levels. What should
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the Cloud user expect in terms of uptime?
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Since the research pool is
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a shared environment, the Cloud provider,
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they need mechanisms to divide up the resources,
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and they also need service levels
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to define who gets what resources.
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Of course, they're managing the physical infrastructure.
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There's going to be some outages,
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there's going to be some blips in
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this very complex infrastructure
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that will affect uptime and reliability.
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Setting those, and providing those to
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the multiple tenants is a key element of multi-tenancy.
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Then last but not least is a chargeback building,
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which is quite comparable to the concept of
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measured service that we were talking about in
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the NIST 5 essential characteristics of Cloud.
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Since the Cloud controller needs to know exactly who is
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using what resources from the pool at all times,
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it is only natural that they have
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this metering in place for billing purposes.
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Just to summarize this video.
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We discussed the five essential characteristics
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common to NIST, resource pooling,
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broad network access,
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rapid elasticity,
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measured service, on-demand self service.
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Then we spent a good amount of time
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talking about multi-tenancy characteristic,
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which is the sixth characteristic in the ISO,
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and all the different considerations
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themselves about what is multi-tenancy
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and what's really important for
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the Cloud provider to ensure when
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they are supporting a multi-tenant environment.
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