1.2 - Benefits of Cloud Computing

What is High Availability (HA) ?

The ability of a system to remain operational to users during planned or unplanned outages (AKA “up time”)

Azure is a highly available cloud environment with up time guarantees depending on the service. These guarantees are defined by ___

SLAs

What does Scalability refer to?

The ability to adjust resources to meet demand. (Example: A sudden traffic peak happens so more hardware resources deployed to handle the increased demand)

What is Vertical Scaling?

It’s where you increase or decrease the capabilities of resources.

What is Horizontal Scaling?

It’s where you add or subtract the number of resources. (Eg, Adding or subtracting VMs or containers based on demand)

Adding or subtracting CPUs and RAM to a virtual machine is an example of _________ scaling

vertical

When scaling horizontally, adding more VMs to deal with increased demand is an example of __________

scaling out (And removing VMs would be scaling in)

In cloud computing terms, what does “Reliability” mean?

The reliability of a system to recover from failures and continue to function.

What makes the cloud so reliable?

Its decentralised design. (Which allows you to have resources deployed in regions around the world. If one region goes down, other regions will still be up and running)

What makes the cloud predictable when it comes to performance?

-Autoscaling

-Load balancing

-High availability

What makes the cloud predictable when it comes to cost?

-The ability to:

-Monitor resource use in real time

-Apply data analytics to find patterns and trends (to help predict future costs)

What are two things you can use to help ensure that all your deployed resources meet corporate standards and government regulatory requirements?

-templates

-cloud based auditing

-automatic updates

If you want maximum control over security, which service model should you choose?

IaaS (If want security to be managed by the vendor, choose PaaS or SaaS)

What does management OF the cloud mean?

It refers to management of cloud resources (Eg: scaling resources, deploying resources from templates, health monitoring of resources)

What does management IN the cloud mean?

It refers to what method (or medium) you use to manage cloud resources. (Eg: Through a web portal, CLI, APIs, PowerShell)