4.0 Virtualization and Cloud Computing (4.1-4.2)

Private cloud

• No resources are shared

• You build your own cloud

• Pay for everything up front (data center)

• No ongoing costs

Public cloud

• Share resources

• Things like AWS

• Infrastructure owned by a third-party

• Cost may be metered or up front

Hybrid cloud

• A combination of public and private cloud infrastructures

Community cloud

• A cloud used by multiple organizations with common goals and policies.

• Can be managed by the organizations or by a third-party.

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)

• Hardware such as servers, desktops, firewalls, switches, etc that are hosted by an external organization

Software as a service (SaaS)

• Software apps over the internet.

• Things like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace

Platform as a service (PaaS)

• Development engines and places to develop, test, and deploy new applications provided by an external organization

• Microsoft Azure, Google App Engine

Shared resources

• Hardware, software, data, applications, etc that are shared between users and organizations on a cloud to optimize cost and/or efficiency.

Metered utilization

• Pay for what you use

• Cost to upload, store, and download

Rapid elasticity

• Scale up and down as needed

• Seamless to the end users

• Instant resource provisioning

High availability

• High availability

  • Systems are always available

  • Redundancy

File synchronization

• All your files can be duplicated across cloud locations once uploaded

Virtual desktop infrastructure

(VDI) on premises

• Same as VDI on the cloud, but the organization has control over the hardware

• Less scalable

VDI in the cloud

• This is when your desktop computer is located on the cloud rather than a physical device.

• Accessed through a screen share

Sandbox

• Isolated testing environment

• No connection to real world or production data

• You can try riskier things

• You are capable of making snapshots to revert work

Test development

• Develop in a secure environment

• Test in a separate, virtual environment

• Create a similar environment that would be found in production

Application virtualization

• Legacy software/OS

  • Run each application instance in different VMs

  • You can create a VM with an older OS version to be compatible

• Cross-platform virtualization

  • No rebooting between different OSs

  • Save time and resources

Resource requirements

• Hypervisor (VM manager)

• CPU may require virtualization support

  • Intel: VT

  • AMD: AMD-V

• Needs lots of RAM available

• Needs lots of disk space for the OS

• Needs network configurations to communicate through your hardware

Security requirements

• VM escaping

  • Malware knows it’s on a VM

  • Malware compromises Hypervisor

  • Malwarejumps from one guest OS to another

• Need normal security practices on each VM (anti-virus, etc)

• Build your own VMs instead of downloading one online