Cloud Technology Part 1

Migrating To The Cloud

Cloud computing has taken the IT sector by storm, companies are in full drive to either migrate from their current setup (which is often an IT estate sitting within a Data Centre) or build a greenfield site in the Cloud. However, it doesn’t have to be an all or nothing approach, with many companies choosing to keep some of their environment on premises and some in the cloud.  This is typical for high performance servers such as HPC clusters, that due to the high throughput and latency, don’t lend themselves well to cloud deployment. Other instances are where the server estate is so old that such legacy hardware and software is not suited for cloud migration. This requires a more planned and re-architected approach, with many companies choosing to decommission such system and rebuild in the cloud when their system is near end of life.

AWS or Azure or Google

For those companies that have taken the decision to shift to the cloud, the choices are several, however for the sake of argument can be limited to three big players, namely AWS (Amazon Web Services), Azure (Microsoft) and GCP (Google Cloud). The market share is heavily on the side of AWS, however in recent years Azure and GCP have been making big inroads in the AWS market share. AWS being first on the scene is still the dominant player and has led this industry since its inception, offering the greatest array of cloud services.

Cloud Agnostic

Some companies choose a more compromising approach to Cloud computing, going with more than one cloud provider, they are termed Cloud Agnostic. Having more than one Cloud provider can be because one provider is better at a certain thing than the other, for example Google Clouds offering of Kubernetes and Azure’s offering of AI. Also, having multiple Cloud providers often entails the greatest discounts and free Cloud credits, as each vendor goes head-to-head competing for the business. At ITCourses we recognise the importance of providing IT Courses for Cloud computing and have hundreds such courses on offer. In future articles we will be writing about each of these courses in greater detail and the type of person they are suited for. The Cloud computing courses we currently have on offer can be found here, there cover AWS, Azure & Google Cloud online IT courses for professionals.