One of the most popular reasons for businesses moving to the cloud is for the use of compute power. This can be for migrating existing on premise workloads or transitioning to a cloud based virtualisation platform. Another reason with be the use of high performance computing. We will discuss some of the various compute options in this blog post.
Compute
Running compute power in the cloud is becoming the standard way to run virtual servers, application services as well as high performance computing. Using older approaches such as onsite data centres and servers with virtualisation has become costly and underused. Often the capacity is not fully used and there is also the cost of hardware maintenance.
By migrating your existing compute workloads to the cloud you can reduce cost, maintenance and increase your reliability and up time. You can migrate your virtual machines (VM's) directly into cloud platforms with minimum or no downtime. Once in the cloud you can then only focus on the management of the software layer and not hardware.
These days its become fairly standard to migrate existing on premises VM's into the cloud despite which hypervisor platform you are using i.e VMware or Hyper-V. You are also able to Physical 2 Virtual physial servers and migrate these to cloud. Please be careful to check your chosen cloud platforms operating system requirements prior to starting any migrations.
HPC High Performance Computing
Another very interesting use of cloud computing is for high performance computing (HPC) using large scale batch compute tasks to run huge loads like rendering. This can be much easier and cheaper than trying to build and run this in an on premise data centre. In the cloud you only pay for what you use and not the spare unused capacity. In HPC you may not be constantly running these workloads so you will not pay for unused compute time.
IaaS and PaaS
You are able to run compute functions in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) whereby you manage and look after your own infrasructue or VM's or via Platform as a Service (PaaS) were you can directly spin up specific functions like web apps that run in the cloud. IaaS may be more suited to a business looking to import existing infrastructure into the cloud and PaaS may be better suited to developers not interested in maintaining any infrastructure.
Containers
Containers are pretty much the future of running applications in the cloud (or even on premises) and with using solutions like Docker and Kubernetes the process of deploying containers has become much easier. In the cloud you can use the relevant cloud platforms Kubernetes engines to spin up containers in seconds and to mange them going forward. Google Cloud's GKE is really leading in this space with Microsoft's AKS which has just become GA (Generally Available) quickly catching up. I will be writing a blog post post about Containers in the near future as this is becoming a really hot topic in cloud computing.
Serverless Functions
Serverless and functions are used by developers to write and run code immediately and not have to deal with any servers or infrastructure at all. Code can be directly run and actioned without any need to worry about capacity planning or server management. Of course there are servers required but these are all managed by the cloud platforrms.
Serverless Functions
Serverless and functions are used by developers to write and run code immediately and not have to deal with any servers or infrastructure at all. Code can be directly run and actioned without any need to worry about capacity planning or server management. Of course there are servers required but these are all managed by the cloud platforrms.
https://cloud.google.com/products/compute/
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/product-categories/compute/
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