Cloud +

private cloud

A cloud model that is used by a single organization.

Consumer of the cloud services

A company or organization that purchases and uses cloud computing services.

service provider

A company that hosts computing systems and sells computing to consumers.

swap file

A file on a hard disk used to provide space for programs that have been transferred from the processor's memory.

Virtual CPU

A physical CPU that has been re-imaged as a virtualized version of the physical CPU and assigned to a virtual machine or VM, in other words, the hardware abstraction of a physical CPU that is a virtualized representation of the CPU. VMs running on the hypervisor will use these virtual CPUs for processing.

co-location facilities

A shared data center operation offered by a service provider.

Vulnerability scanning

A software application that is used to find objects in your cloud deployment that can be exploited that are potential security threats. The vulnerability scanner is an application that has a database of known exploits and runs them against your deployment.

Load balancing

Allows for many servers to share an application load, redundancy, and scalability by allocating traffic to many devices instead of to a single device.

security

Cloud service providers offer many security services including firewalls, access control, intrusion detection and prevention systems, and encryption services.

Orchestration platforms

Cloud software used to deploy and manage cloud services.

CPU, memory, and storage

Elements and objects are examples of devices and systems in the cloud. In this question, the elements are

virtualization

Hardware abstraction that allows a single piece of physical equipment to be presented to software systems and multiple platforms.

terminal servers

In a data center, devices called are deployed that have many serial ports, each cabled to a console port on a device that is being managed

availability zones (AZs)

Isolated locations within data center regions that public cloud services originate and operate.

Communications as a Service

It includes cloud-hosted voice, video conferencing, instant messaging, e-mail, collaboration, and other communication services.

development, operations, and quality assurance networks

It is common practice and strongly encouraged to split operations into different and isolated sections of the cloud to prevent interference between

development, operations, and quality assurance networks.

It is common practice and strongly encouraged to split operations into different and isolated sections of the cloud to prevent interference between

Know what replication and synchronization are.

Know that replication is the transfer and synchronization of data between multiple data centers. For disaster recovery purposes and data security, your data must be transferred, or replicated, between data centers. Remote copies of data have traditionally been implemented with storage backup applications. However, with the virtualization of servers in the cloud, you can now replicate complete VM instances, which allows you to replicate complete server instances, with all of the applications, service packs, and content, to a remote facility.

mainframe computers

Large centralized computing systems.

regions

geographical area of presence for cloud service providers.

utilities

An organization selling a service such as electricity, water, or cloud computing.

Know the basic cloud concepts covered in this lesson.

Cloud characteristics will certainly be on the exam, and the concepts of elasticity, on-demand, pay-as-you-grow, and others covered in this lesson must be understood not only for the exam but to provide a good background of information for you to build on as you progress through your preparation to be a Cloud+ certified professional.

Know that cloud computing is similar in operation to a utility.

Cloud computing follows the utilities model where a provider will sell computing resources using an as-needed or as-consumed model. This allows a company or individual to pay for only what they use.

Know what cloud computing is.

Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models.

Understand cloud performance components. .

Cloud performance encompasses all of the individual capabilities of the various components as well as how they interoperate. The performance you are able to achieve with your deployment is a combination of the capabilities and architecture of the cloud service provider and how you design and implement your operations. A well-architected framework includes many different components, including but not limited to application performance, bandwidth, caching, database performance, filesystem performance, inter-availability zone performance, network latency, scalability, storage I/O operations per second, storage read/write performance, and swap file utilization

Understand the different cloud service models and how to differentiate between them.

Cloud service models are characterized by the phrase as a service and are accessed by many types of devices, including web browsers, thin clients, and mobile devices. There are three primary service types. Software as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service, and Platform as a Service are the core service offerings. Many cloud service providers offer more descriptive terms in their marketing and sales offerings, including Communications as a Service, Anything as a Service, Desktop as a Service, and Business Process as a Service. However, all of these newer terms fit into either the SaaS, IaaS, or PaaS service model. The basic terms and concepts are important to know for the exam. Study the service models and know the differences between IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS as well as the other service models.

Baselines

Collected data that provides trend analysis and capacity utilization information measured over time to determine average or expected metrics of a service in normal operation; a point-in-time view of operations that needs to be constantly tracked as part of your ongoing operations.

Be able to identify and explain cloud components.

Common cloud components include applications, automation, computing, networking, security, and virtualization.

Off-premise

Computing resources hosted remotely from a company's data center.

In-house computing

Computing systems hosted and managed by a company

Platform as a Service

Consumer is able to deploy onto the cloud infrastructure applications created using programming languages and tools supported by the provider.

On-premise hosting

Creating and hosting cloud services in-house in a private enterprise data center.

Know how to prepare for a cloud deployment.

Creating complete documentation, creating baselines, and preparing for a migration to the cloud will be fair game for questions on the exam

Know what regions and availability zones are.

Large cloud operations partition operations into geographical regions for fault tolerance and to offer localized performance advantages. A region is not a monolithic data center but rather a geographical area of presence. The actual data centers in each region are availability zones. Each region will usually have two or more availability zones for fault tolerance. The AZs are isolated locations within cloud data center regions that public cloud providers originate and operate. Each availability zone is a physically separate data center with its own redundant power and telecommunication connections.

variance

Monitoring and alerting functions of the application to determine the baseline and then use the baseline as your reference point to determine what is to be considered out of range.

Cloud service models

NIST's definitions of standardized cloud service offerings.

Quality assurance networks

Networks that are for ongoing offline maintenance to test a company's applications and software systems. .

Production networks

Networks that host the live and in-use applications that are usually public-facing in the cloud.

development network

Networks used in the creation and testing of new cloud-based services and primarily used by software programmers and DevOps groups.

Understand automation and orchestration concepts.

Orchestration platforms automate the provisioning of cloud services and often include a self-service dashboard that allows the consumer to manage and deploy cloud services with a web browser. The automation used by cloud providers allows for fast deployment of new services and applications.

Cloud computing

Outsourcing of data center operations, applications, or any part of operations for a provider of computing resources.

memory, storage, networking, and CPU

Pooled virtual resources include

baseline measurements, a determination of capacity requirements, and complete documentation

Prior to performing a cloud migration, _____ are all requirements for success.

HTTP

Probably the most common and easiest way of managing remote devices is to use a standard browser and access the remote device's web interface

Console ports

Serial port for CLI access.

bare-metal server

Server hardware including motherboards and storage, processing, and networking components. A bare-metal server does not run a hypervisor.

Automation

Software systems operating in a cloud provider's data center that automate the deployment and monitoring of cloud offerings.

Load testing

Testing that puts a demand or load on your application or compute system and measures the response.

high availability

The ability of a resource to remain available after a failure of a system.

on-demand computing

The ability of consumers to access self-service portals to create additional cloud services on demand.

Ubiquitous access

The ability to access cloud services from anywhere in the network from a variety of devices.

CPU affinity

The ability to assign a processing thread to a core instead of having the hypervisor dynamically allocate it.

Know the cloud scaling requirements.

The ability to automatically and dynamically add additional resources such as storage, CPUs, memory, and even servers is referred to as elasticity. This is done "on the fly" as needed and is different from provisioning servers with added resources that may be required in the future. This allows for cloud consumers to automatically scale up as their workload increases and then have the cloud remove the services after the workload subsides. On-demand cloud services allow the cloud customer to access a self-service portal and instantly create additional servers, storage, processing power, or any other services as required. If the computing workload increases, then additional cloud resources can be created and applied as needed. On-demand allows customers to consume cloud services only as needed and scale back when they are no longer required. Pay as you grow (PAYG) is like a basic utility such as power or water where you pay for only what you use.

elasticity

The ability to automatically and dynamically add resources such as storage, CPUs, memory, and even servers is referred to as

Resource pooling

The allocation of compute resources into a group, or pool. Then these pools are made available to a multitenant cloud environment.

Software as a Service

The consumer can use the provider's applications running on a cloud infrastructure.

Know the primary cloud delivery models.

The four primary cloud delivery models are public, private, community, and hybrid clouds. Know what each one is and its function. It is critical that you understand the way cloud services are delivered in the market today and what they offer.

virtual network interface card (vNIC).

The hardware abstraction of a physical network interface card that is a virtualized representation of the NIC. VMs running on the hypervisor will use these for network connectivity to a vSwitch.

virtual switch

The hardware abstraction of a physical network switch that is a virtualized representation of the switch. The vSwitch runs on the hypervisor and interconnects the VMs to the physical data network.

Synchronous replication

The process of replicating data in real time from the primary storage system to a remote facility. Synchronous replication writes data to both the primary storage system and the replica simultaneously to ensure that the remote data is current with local replicas. Data is always consistent between replicas.

Penetration testing

The process of testing your cloud access to determine whether there is any vulnerability that an attacker could exploit.

automation

The use of variances also assists in the of the cloud.

VDI

This consists of cloud-hosted PC desktops accessed remotely.

NIST

This is a U.S. federal organization that defines cloud computing standards and models.

XaaS

This is a complete IT services package that is a combination of many different types of cloud services.

VPN

This is a secure and usually encrypted connection over a public network.

Desktop as a Service

This is a virtual PC desktop that is hosted in the cloud and accessed remotely by thin clients.

Business Process as a Service

This is when a company outsources to the cloud many business applications, such as inventory, shipping, supply chain finance, and other business software applications

UCaaS

This typically includes voice, video conferencing, instant messaging, e-mail, collaboration, and all other communication services that are hosted in the cloud.

Know the cloud shared resource pooling model and how it is used.

Understand that resource pooling is when the cloud service provider allocates resources into a group, or pool, and then these pools are made available to a multitenant cloud environment. The resources are then dynamically allocated and reallocated as the demand requires. Resource pooling hides the physical hardware from the virtual machines and allows for many tenants to share resources such as storage, processors, RAM, and networks to allow for the economies of cloud computing.

Pay as you grow (PAYG)

When the consumer pays for only the cloud services used

memory pools

When the hypervisor virtualizes physical RAM into pools that are allocated for use to the virtual machines.

storage pools

When the hypervisor virtualizes physical storage capacity into storage pools that are allocated for use to the virtual machines.

compute pools

When the hypervisor virtualizes the physical CPU into virtual pools that are allocated by the hypervisor to virtual machines.

Asynchronous replication

Writes the data to the primary storage location and then later sends copies to the remote replicas. With asynchronous replication, there will be a delay as the data is copied to the backup site and becomes consistent because it uses a store-and- forward design.

compute resources

actual central processing of data and applications on either a physical or virtualized server running a variety of operating systems.

just-in-time service

allows cloud services to be added as they are required and removed after the workload subsides.

On-demand cloud computing

allows the consumer to dynamically add and change resources with the use of an online portal.

Network delays, storage input/output performance, swap file usage, and the ability to scale

are all examples of cloud performance components.

On-demand

cloud services allow the cloud customer to access a self-service portal and instantly create additional servers, storage, processing power, or any other services as required.

Infrastructure as a Service

consumer is able to provision processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources and is able to deploy and run arbitrary software, which can include operating systems and applications

Anything as a Service

could best be described as offering complete IT services as a package.

Large storage arrays and storage area networks

exist in the cloud for use by cloud service consumers. Common storage media are solid-state drives (SSDs) and magnetic physical drives. Storage systems include object, block, and file-based systems.

Secure Shell (SSH) protocol

has largely replaced Telnet as a remote access method remote connection method. configure network devices such as switches and routers. support encryption Data transmitted over a network is secure

reference designs and delivery models

help to differentiate between cloud offerings in the marketplace.

public cloud

infrastructure designed for use by public consumers.

Virtualization

is the ability to take physical data center resources such as RAM, CPU, storage, and networking and create a software representation of those resources in large-scale cloud offerings.

Change management

is the process of managing all aspects of ongoing upgrades, repairs, and reconfigurations of your cloud services.

hybrid computing

many clouds are interconnected by companies to meet their requirements

ram

memory resource in a bare-metal server.

Community clouds

offered for a specific community of interest and shared by companies with similar requirements for regulatory compliance, security, or policy.

Replication

process of placing copies of stored data on more than one system for disaster recovery and resiliency purposes

Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP)

proprietary protocol developed by Microsoft to allow remote access to Windows devices

Application

signify user applications, including databases, web servers, e-mail, big data, and other common business software applications.

Network cloud services

traditional switching and routing as well as services such as load balancing, DNS, DHCP, and virtual private networks.

hypervisor

will pool the resources and make them available to the VMs for consumption