IaaS Infrastructure As A Service The Ultimate Guide

Januari 24, 2023Desember 7, 2022 falma.u99 guide, infrastructure, service, ultimate

IaaS Architecture
In the IaaS model, cloud providers host infrastructure like servers, storage, networking hardware, and hypervisors, meaning organizations do not need to have this requirement in their on-premise data center.

IaaS providers offer a variety of services over this infrastructure. These include:

* Multi tenancy and billing management
* Logging and monitoring
* Security
* Clustering, failover and load balancing
* Backup, replication and recovery

Most IaaS providers offer policy-driven services, allowing users to implement a high level of automation and coordinate critical infrastructure tasks. For example, users can implement policies that automate load balancing to maintain application performance and availability.

IaaS customers can access resources and services over a wide area network (WAN) such as the Internet, and instruct the cloud provider to deploy a complete application stack. For example, a user can connect to the IaaS platform remotely to create virtual machines (VMs). They can install an operating system and an enterprise application on each virtual machine, deploy local disk storage, large-scale object storage, and database systems. The user can then use the provider’s services for cost tracking, performance monitoring, network traffic balancing, disaster recovery management, and more.

Most IaaS users consume cloud services via a cloud provider, such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure (see our list of top cloud providers). This is known as public cloud computing. Organizations can also set up their own IaaS infrastructure, creating what is known as a private cloud, or in combination with public cloud resources, a hybrid cloud.

Learn more in our in-depth guides to:

Multi-Tenant Architecture in the Cloud
Multi-Tenant Architecture in the Cloud Multi-tenancy makes it possible for one software application or infrastructure component to serve multiple customers. Customers are referred to as “tenants”. Each tenant might have the ability to customize the infrastructure or service they receive, but they usually do not have full access to its configuration or source code.

A multi-tenant architecture runs applications or infrastructure in a shared environment. Every tenant is logically separated, while working on resources that are physically integrated with those of other tenants. This means that a multi-tenant component shares one instance of configurations, user management, and data.

Most cloud environments are based on the multi-tenancy model. Both public clouds and private clouds use multi-tenancy, allowing multiple users or groups (whether from different organizations or the same organization) to run workloads separately. For example, in a multi-tenant public cloud environment, multiple organizations or users can run workloads on the same physical server. However, each user only sees their own workloads, a concept known as isolation.

Learn more in our in-depth guide to multi-tenant architecture

What is Platform as a Service (PaaS)?
Platform as a Service (PaaS) provides some infrastructure components, along with additional managed service and software. A PaaS is a framework developers can use to create their own applications, focusing on developing software functionality for their end users. The cloud provider manages complex back-end infrastructure, including computing resources, operating systems, software updates, storage, networking, and integrations.

What is Software as a Service (SaaS)?
Software as a service (SaaS) is a popular choice for cloud users. Because SaaS delivers software to end users over the Internet, most SaaS applications run directly from a web browser and do not need to be downloaded or installed by the customer. PaaS, on the other hand, delivers a software development platform. The majority of cloud consumers do not need PaaS.

This web services model eliminates the need for IT staff to download and install applications on local devices. SaaS enables providers to simplify service and support for their business, while solving potential technical problems such as data and storage management, middleware, servers, and networking.

Key Differences Between IaaS, PaaS and SaaS

* PaaS is based on the IaaS model—this is because, in addition to infrastructure components, the provider manages the operating systems, middleware, and other operating environments for cloud users. PaaS workloads simplify deployment but offer more limited flexibility compared to a pure IaaS model.
* SaaS manages all infrastructure and applications needed for the end user—SaaS users don’t need to install or deploy anything. They can typically just login and start using the provider’s application, running on the provider’s infrastructure. Users can customize the behavior of applications, add their own data, and restrict access. Almost all other aspects are the responsibility of the SaaS provider.

Top 9 Cloud Computing Providers
* Amazon Web Services—AWS was the first major IaaS provider in 2008, and is today the leading provider of public cloud computing. It provides a complete computing stack that enables organizations to deploy almost any combination or software and hardware infrastructure.
* Microsoft Azure—Microsoft Azure is the world’s second largest cloud provider. It is the obvious choice for hosting Microsoft-based systems on the cloud, and is a common choice for government agencies. It also runs an increasing number of non-Microsoft workloads, including Linux, HPC, and SAP systems.
* Google Cloud Platform—offers a more limited set of services compared to AWS and Azure, but competes on price and provides the Anthos Platform, which makes it easier to create multi cloud solutions and avoid vendor lock in.
* IBM Cloud—a group of enterprise cloud computing services developed by IBM. Includes IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS solutions supporting public, private, and hybrid cloud models.
* Alibaba Cloud—the leading cloud provider in China, which is forging alliances to become a key player across Asia.
* Dell Technologies/VMware—Dell acquired VMware and is using it to provide a true multi cloud offering. VMware is today fully container based, and enables companies to run the same workloads on leading public clouds like Amazon, Azure and Google Cloud, as well as on premises. The VMware Cloud solution allows users to run VMware workloads on all major public clouds.
* Hewlett Packard Enterprise—Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s hybrid cloud strategy focuses on its hardware stack, including Aruba wireless networking and edge computing solutions, and software platforms like Greenlake, SimPVT, and Synergy. HPE has partnerships with Red Hat, VMware, and the major cloud providers.
* Oracle Cloud—Oracle’s public cloud has a competitive advantage in IoT, OLTP, microservices, artificial intelligence and machine learning. It provides its popular database software as IaaS and PaaS offerings, and also provides the Oracle Data Cloud, which enables big data analytics for business data.
* AT&T Business—offers business solutions on the cloud, including content management, content delivery and data recovery. AT&T also offers consulting and professional services to help customers migrate to the cloud.

Learn more in our guides comparing popular cloud services:

IaaS Pricing: AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud
The following table will help you understand the basic pricing model offered by the big three cloud providers.

Price Parameter

AWS

Azure

Google Cloud

Compute Instances

* General Purpose, Computer Optimized, Memory Optimized instances
* Price per second determined by the number of CPUs, memory, and other hardware resources

Reserved Instances

Commit to 1-3 years with three payment options: upfront, partial payment and the balance monthly, or monthly payment

Commit to 1-3 years and pay balance upfront

Offers a discount for commitment to 1 or 3 years, with monthly payments

Object Storage—Frequent Access

Basic rate for first 50 TB, discounts for TB and over 500 TB

Flat rate per GB per month

Object Storage—Infrequent Access

Three tiers: Infrequent access, One Zone Infrequent Access, Archive Storage

Two tiers: Infrequent access, Archive storage

Two tiers: Nearline storage, Coldline storage

Block Storage

Two tiers: HDD, SSD, and free tier up to 30GB

Two tiers: HDD, SSD

Offers standard local/regional volumes, SSD local/regional volumes, multi-regional snapshot storage

Rating Frequency

Per-Hour for most services, Per-Second for EC2 and Reserved instances

Per-Hour for most services, Per-Second offered for Windows VMs and Container instances

Per-Second pricing for all services

Official Pricing Information

Official pricing
Cost calculator

Learn more in our guides comparing cloud services pricing:

IaaS High Availability
High availability is an important principle of cloud computing. This is especially important for mission critical systems where downtime due to business interruptions is unacceptable. Downtime can hurt productivity and lead to financial losses.

IaaS services are known for their ability to provide a high level ofredundancy, spreading applications across multiple physical machines in different locations. They can also provideauto scaling, a mechanism that allows systems to automatically scale up to additional machines on the cloud when loads increase.

AWS High Availability Architecture
Amazon Web Services has built a massive global infrastructure to provide high availability and flexibility for customer workloads.

Amazon offers cloud services in 24 regions (see the mapof the Amazon regions). Amazon defines a region as a geographic area with at least three different data centers known as availability zones (AZs).

Each AWS availability zone is a fully localized infrastructure with redundant power supplies, networks, and Internet connectivity. Currently, Amazon supports 77 Availability Zones worldwide. Each AZ typically has three or more data centers in one location, separated by a “meaningful distance” of up to 100 km. This ensures a physical disaster is unlikely to take down all data centers in the AZ, and yet enables high-speed connections between the data centers.

Learn more in our in-depth guide toAWS high availability.

Learn more in our in-depth guide to AWS auto scaling.

Azure High Availability Architecture
Like AWS, Azure also bases its high availability architecture on regions and availability zones. Azure always stores three copies of user data across three availability zones. This is called redundant local storage. Customers can opt for global redundant storage, to create up to three additional copies of their data in a “paired region”, a nearby region that has fast connectivity with the first region, for added flexibility.

Azure availability zones achieve high availability by distributing resources across multiple data centers in a customer’s region. Azure provides additional services like Azure Site Recovery and Azure Backup to achieve the required recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) for their applications.

Learn more in our in-depth guide toAzure high availability.

Google Cloud SQL High Availability Architecture
In Google Cloud, resources that operate in one zone are called “zonal resources”. Other resources operate across an entire region and are called “regional resources”. For example, a Google Cloud virtual machine instance or persistent disk is a zonal resource, while a static IP address is a regional resource.

Google adds the concept of clusters—clusters are groups of physical computers inside a physical data center, with independent power, cooling, networking, and security infrastructure. This allows Google Compute Engine to balance customer resources across clusters in the same zone, while retaining high connectivity between the physical machines in each cluster.

Learn more in our in-depth guide to Google Cloud high availability.

Amazon S3
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is the first and most popular Amazon service, which provides object storage at unlimited scale. S3 is easy to access via the Internet and programmatically via API, and is integrated into a wide range of applications. It provides 11 9’s of durability (99. %), and offers several storage tiers, allowing users to move data that is used less frequently into a low-cost archive tier within S3.

Related content: read our guide to mountingS3 as a file system.

AWS EC2
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) offers scalable computing resources. It lets you run as many virtual servers as you want, configure your network and security, and manage storage. You can increase or decrease resources on-demand according to changing business requirements, and set up auto scaling to scale resources up and down according to actual workloads.

AWS EBS
Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) is a block-level storage service for use with Amazon EC2 instances. When mounted on an Amazon EC2 instance, you can use Amazon EBS volumes like any other raw block storage device. It can be formatted and mirrored for specific file systems, host operating systems, and applications.

Learn more in our in-depth guide toAWS EBS.

AWS EFS
Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) provides a simple, scalable, and fully managed elastic NFS file system for use with AWS cloud services and on-premises resources. It can support up to petabytes of data, automatically scaling as files are added and removed, eliminating the need to configure and manage storage capacity.

Learn more in our in-depth guide toAWS EFS.

AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda is a serverless, on-demand IT service that provides developers with a fully managed, event-driven cloud system that executes code. AWS Lambda uses Lambda functions—anonymous functions that are not associated with identifiers—enabling users to package any code into a function and run it, independently of other infrastructure.

Learn more aboutAWS Serverlessecosystem.

Learn more about AWS Lambda.

AWS FSx
Amazon FSx is a fully-managed service that lets you launch, run, and scale high-performance file systems in the AWS cloud. AWS handles management tasks such as hardware provisioning, backups, and patching. The underlying infrastructure powering this service consists of the latest AWS networking, compute, and disk technologies.

AWS FSx offers various capabilities delivered as a reliable, secure, and scalable cloud service that achieves high performance and lower TCO. The service lets you choose a file system to support your storage, including NetApp ONTAP, Lustre, and Windows File Server. FSx

provides full access to all feature sets, data management capabilities, and performance profiles.

Learn more in our in-depth guide to AWS FSx.

Linux Virtual Machines in Azure
Traditionally Azure focused on Windows virtual machines, but now has a robust offering for Linux users as well. Azure virtual machines (VMs) are scalable on-demand compute resources provided by Azure.

Microsoft Azure supports popular Linux distributions deployed and managed by multiple partners. Linux machine images are available in the Azure Marketplace for the following Linux distributions (more distributions are added on an ongoing basis):

* FreeBSD
* Red Hat Enterprise
* CentOS
* SUSE Linux Enterprise
* Debian
* Ubuntu
* CoreOS
* RancherOS

Learn more in our in-depth guide to Linux on Azure.

Azure Files
Azure Files is a cloud file storage service that provides access to server message block (SMB) file shares. These shares can be configured as part of an Azure storage account. Azure Files enables cloud-based virtual machines and on-premise applications to share files using standard protocols.

Learn more in our in-depth guide toAzure Files.

Azure Managed Disk
Azure managed disks are block-level storage volumes managed by Azure and used by Azure virtual machines. A managed disk is similar to a physical disk on a local server, but it is virtualized. For managed disks, you only need to specify the disk size and disk type, and provision—Azure does the rest. The available hard drive types are:

* Standard hard disks (HDD)
* Standard SSD
* Premium SSDs
* Ultra disks—optimized for sub-millisecond latency

Related content: read our guide toAzure Disk pricing.

Azure Blob Storage
Azure Blob Storage is Microsoft’s object storage service, similar to Amazon S3. Blob storage is suitable for storing large amounts of unstructured data. Blob storage offers sixteen 9’s of durability, and advanced security features including RBAC, encryption at rest and advanced threat protection. IT also supports lifecycle management and immutable storage (WORM), which can help protect against data loss and threats like Ransomware.

Related content: read our guide toAzure Blob Storage pricing.

HPC on Azure
Azure provides high performance computing (HPC) resources, which you can deploy purely on the public cloud, or combine with local HPC resources to create a hybrid HPC deployment. Azure provides an HPC head node which is used to schedule jobs and workloads, and a virtual machine scale set, with large numbers of VMs that can be used to run massively parallel workloads. These VMs can include both CPU and GPU hardware, depending on the type of processing required.

Learn more in our in-depth guide toHPC on Azure.

SAP on Azure
A large variety of SAP applications can be deployed to Azure, using predefined virtual machines created and certified by SAP.

SAP HANA
You can run the SAP HANA in-memory database on Azure, using M-series VMs that scale up to 4TB memory, certified for use with SAP HANA. Another option is Mv2 VMs, the largest SAP HANA certified VMs in the public cloud, with 6TB of memory. Azure offers a service level agreement (SLA) of 99.99% for instances in high availability pairs, and 99.9% for standalone instances.

SAP S/4HANA
You can deploy SAP S/4HANA on Azure, with remote connection via Azure ExpressRoute for Fiori applications. Azure provides an SLA of 99.99% SLA if you run S/4HANA in two Azure availability zones. It also provides backup and recovery in second, even for databases with multiple TBs of data.

To learn about other SAP solutions on Azure, see our in-depth guide to SAP on Azure.

VDI on Azure
Microsoft Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) offers multi-tenant support for Windows 10 and a Windows Virtual Desktop license. Azure provides the FSLogix configuration file container, which decouples user configuration files from the underlying operating system. Azure recently launched MSIX AppAttach, which allows you to package a Win32 application in an MSIX application container.

Read our in-depth guide to VDI on Azure.

Google Cloud IaaS Services
Google Cloud Storage
Google Cloud Storage is an object storage service by Google Cloud. It provides features like object versioning and extended permissions (per item or bucket). Google Cloud offers two archive storage tiers with lower pricing and fast retrieval times, called Nearline and Coldline.

Learn more about storage options in Google Cloud—lock, network file, and object storage—in our guide toGoogle Cloud Storage.

Google Cloud Filestore
Google Cloud Filestore uses NFS version 3 and is designed for workloads requiring low latency and minimal performance fluctuations. This service has two levels of performance: standard and premium. The premium tier can support very high performance—700 Mbps for reads, 350 Mbps for writes, and a maximum of IOPS of 30,000.

Google Persistent Disk
In Google Cloud, a Persistent Disk is a storage device that you can access from a virtual machine, like a physical hard drive. The data is spread across multiple physical hard drives in the Google data center. Google Compute Engine manages the distribution of data for optimal redundancy and performance.

Learn more aboutGoogle Cloud Persistent Disk: How to Create a Virtual Image with Google Cloud Compute Engine.

Adopting IaaS: Cloud Migration Strategies
Following are the most common approaches to cloud migration, taken from the influential “5 Rs” model proposed by Gartner.

Learn more in our in-depth guide tocloud migration strategy.

Rehosting
Re-hosting (also known as “lift and shift”) is the fastest way to move your application to the cloud. This is usually the first approach taken in a cloud migration project because it allows moving the application to the cloud without any changes. Both physical and virtual servers are migrated to infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Lift and shift is commonly used to improve performance and reliability for legacy applications.

Learn more in our in-depth guide tolift and shift.

Replatforming, Refactoring, or Re-architecture
This migration strategy involves detailed planning and a high investment, but it is the only strategy that can help you get the most out of the cloud. Applications that undergo replatforming or re-architecture are completely rebuilt on cloud-native infrastructure. They scale up and down on-demand, are portable between cloud resources and even between different cloud providers.

Repurchasing
In most cases, repurchasing is as easy as moving from an on-premise application to a SaaS platform. Typical examples are switching from internal CRM to Salesforce.com, or switching from internal email server to Google’s G Suite. It is a simple license change, which can reduce labor, maintenance, and storage costs for the organization.

Retire
When planning a move to the cloud, it often turns out that part of the company’s IT product portfolio is no longer useful and can be decommissioned. Removing old applications allows you to focus time and budget on high priority applications and improve overall productivity.

Retain
Moving to the cloud doesn’t make sense for all applications. You need a strong business model to justify migration costs and downtime. Additionally, some industries require strict compliance with laws that prevent data migration to the cloud. Some on-premises solutions should be kept on-premises, and can be supported in a hybrid cloud migration model.

Now that we’ve covered some of the general strategies for migrating workloads to the cloud, let’s dive deeper into specific best practices for migrating to each of the big three cloud providers: AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud

AWS Migration Best Practices
Leverage AWS Tools
AWS offers a wide range of tools designed for the migration process, from the initial planning phase to features for post-migration. Here are several useful tools to consider:

* AWS Migration Hub – a dashboard that centralizes data and helps you monitor and track the progress of migration.
* AWS Application Discovery – collects data needed for pre-migration due diligence.
* TSO Logic – offers data-driven recommendations based on predictive analytics. The recommendations are tailored to help during the planning and strategizing phase.
* AWS Server Migration Service – provides automation, scheduling, and tracking capabilities for incremental migrations.
* AWS Database Migration Service – keeps the source data store fully-operational while the migration is in process, to minimize downtime.

Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration – improves the speed of data transfers made to Amazon S3, to maximize available bandwidth.

Automate Repetitive Tasks
The migration process typically involves many repetitive tasks. You can perform these tasks manually, and you can automate them. The main purpose of automation is to enable you to achieve a higher level of efficiency while reducing costs. In many cases, automation can also help you complete tasks much faster than manually possible.

Outline and Share a Clear Cloud Governance Model
A cloud governance model defines and specifies the practices, roles, responsibilities, tools, and procedures involved in the governance of your cloud environments. Your model needs to be as clear as possible, to ensure all relevant stakeholders understand how cloud resources should be managed and used. Ideally, you should define this information before migrating.

Here are several questions your cloud governance model should answer:

* What controls are set in place to meet security and privacy requirements?
* How many AWS accounts are maintained?
* What privileges are enabled for each role?

There are many more considerations to address in your cloud governance model, depending on your industry and business needs. Be sure to keep your documentation flexible to allow for change and optimization after the migration process is completed and your workloads settle in the new cloud environment.

Learn more in our detailed guide to AWS migration

Azure Migration Best Practices
Azure Migration Tools
Azure offers several migration tools designed to simplify and automate the migration process. Here are three commonly used Azure migration tools:

* Azure Migrate—helps you to assess your local workloads, determine the required size of cloud resources, and estimate cloud costs.
* Microsoft Assessment and Planning—helps you discover your servers and applications and build an inventory. Additionally, this tool can create reports that determine whether Azure can support your workloads.
* Azure Database Migration Service—helps you migrate on-premise SQL Server workloads to Azure.

Cost Management in Azure
Cloud resources are highly accessible and flexible, but costs can quickly skyrocket if you don’t have a cost management strategy in place. Here are several tools and techniques you can use to manage your cloud costs:

* Tag your resources – to manage costs, you need visibility into cloud resource consumption. You can set this up by tagging resources and monitoring them. Be sure to use standard tags and keep this organized.
* Use policies – to automate tagging and monitoring. Cloud resources are highly scalable and this can make manual tagging and monitoring incredibly time consuming. Use policies to standardize the process and automation to enforce these rules.

You can leverage either third-party and first-party tools for tagging. There are also tools dedicated to cost management and optimization and monitoring. In addition, you can set up role-based access control (RBAC) to ensure resources are properly used by authorized users, and set up several resource groups.

Review Every Policy and Procedure
Policies and procedures are a foundational component of the migration process and heavily impact the success of the implementation. To ensure your migration runs smoothly, you should define and review all policies and then apply them in a cohesive and standardized manner.

Properly implementing security can ensure all required security measures are set in place. Policies are not only responsible for enforcing security, but also help you achieve and maintain compliance. Data encryption, for example, is a component you can enforce using a policy.

Once you define your policies and procedures, you should test them before running in production. You can automate this process using several tools. Azure Migrate, for example, can help you automatically identify, assess, and migrate your local VMs to the Azure cloud.

Learn more in our detailed guide to Azure migration

Google Cloud Migration Best Practices
Moving Data
Here are several aspects to consider when migrating to Google Cloud:

* Move your data first – and then move the rest of the application. This is recommended by Google.
* Choose the relevant storage – Google Cloud offers several tiers for hot and warm storage, as well as several archiving options. You can also leverage SSDs and hard discks, or choose a cloud-based database service, such as Bigtable, Datastore, and Google Cloud SQL.
* Plan the data transfer process – determine and define how to physically move your data. You can, for example, send your offline disk to a Google data center or opt to stream to persistent disks.

Moving Applications
There are several ways to migrate applications, depending on the application’s suitability to the cloud. In some cases, you might need to re-architect the entire application before it can be moved to the cloud. In other cases, you might need to do light modification before the migration. Ideally, when possible, your application can be lifted and shifted to the cloud.

A lift and shift migration means you do not need to make any changes to your application. You can lift it and move it directly to the new cloud environment. For example, you can create a local VM within your on-premise center, and then import it as a Google VM. Alternatively, you can backup your application to GCP – this option lets you automatically create a cloud copy.

Optimize
After the migration process is complete and your application is safely hosted in the cloud, you need to set up measures that help you continuously optimize your cloud environment. Here are several tools offered by Google:

* Google Cloud operations suite (Stackdriver) – provides features that enable full observability into your Google cloud environment. The information is centralized in a single database that lets you run queries and leverage root-cause analysis to gain detailed insights.
* Google Cloud Pub/Sub – helps you set up communication between any independent applications. You can use Pub/Sub to rapidly scale, decouple applications, and improve performance.
* Google Cloud Deployment Manager – lets you automate the configuration of your applications. You specify the requirements and Deployment Manager automatically initiates the deployments. Learn more in our detailed guide to Google Cloud migration

Running Mission Critical Applications in the Cloud
A mission-critical application relies on continuous availability and cannot undergo even a brief downtime. This can lead to financial, reputational, and operational damages to an entire business or a segment.

When provisioning a mission critical application, you need to ensure stability and availability at all times. You can achieve this by creating redundant copies of your application and hot backups. Additionally, you can duplicate your production and staging environments and test them.

Learn more in our detailed guides about mission critical applications and business critical applications

Large enterprises typically use the following three types of mission critical applications:

* Backup and disaster recovery – strategies are critical to ensure business continuity. Your recovery strategy should provide a short recovery time objective (RTO) and minimize the recovery point objective (RPO).
* Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) – systems manage business processes, providing capabilities to manage finances, manufacturing, distribution, the supply chain, human resources, and more. ERPs must remain operational at all times.
* VIrtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) – solutions help you remotely deliver a desktop image to endpoint devices via an Internet network. VDI technology enables users to access mission critical applications on their smartphones, laptops, and other thin-client devices.

Traditionally, mission-critical applications are hosted on-premises, but today many of these applications are moving to cloud environments. The cloud can provide enterprises with a high level of flexibility and scalability. Ideally, if cloud resources are properly utilized and optimized, enterprises can significantly reduce their costs by moving to the cloud.

There are, however, several challenges enterprises face when migrating their mission-critical applications to the cloud. The migration process is a major challenge for many enterprises. The process itself can take time, for one, and comes with a unique set of risks. For many enterprises, security and compliance are critical and must be maintained at all times.

The cost of migration and unforeseen overhead can also run high. However, it is possible to address these challenges. To successfully migrate mission critical applications, enterprises can leverage techniques and solutions designed for the migration process. Planning the migration is especially helpful to minimize overhead and ensure known challenges are addressed in advance.

Learn more about running mission critical applications on the Microsoft Azure cloud in our detailed guides to:

Deep Learning in the Cloud
Deep learning is at the center of most artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives. It is based on the concept of a deep neural network, which passes inputs through multiple layers of connections. Neural networks can perform many complex cognitive tasks, improving performance dramatically compared to traditional machine learning algorithms. However, they often require huge data volumes to train and can be very computationally intensive.

Deep learning is often a time-consuming and costly endeavor, especially regarding training models. Many factors can impact the process, but processing power is critical to ensure the pipeline works effectively. Graphics processing units (GPUs) provide the processing power needed for computationally intensive operations, but setting this up is not affordable for all organizations.

Cloud computing vendors provide various services to help make deep learning more affordable and accessible. Services may vary between vendors, but most can help you manage large datasets and train algorithms on distributed hardware. Here are notable offerings from the top cloud vendors – Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud:

AWS

AWS provides four instance options, available in multiple sizes. These include EC2 P2, P3, G3, and G4 instances. With these instances, you can choose to access NVIDIA Tesla M60, T4 Tensor, K80, or V100 GPUs and can include up to 16 GPUs per instance.

With AWS, you also have the option of using Amazon Elastic Graphics. This service enables you to connect your EC2 instances to various low-cost GPUs. You can attach GPUs to any instance compatible for greater workload flexibility. The Elastic Graphics service also provides up to 8GB of memory and supports OpenGL 4.3.

Azure

Azure provides several choices for GPU-based instances. These instances are designed for high computation tasks, including deep learning, simulations, and visualizations.

In Azure, you can choose from three instance series:

* NC-series—optimized for compute and network-intensive workloads. These instances can support OpenCL and CUDA-based applications and simulations. Available GPUs include NVIDIA Tesla V100, Intel Broadwell, and Intel HaswellGPUs.
* NV-series—optimized for visualizations, encoding, streaming and virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI). These instances support OpenGL and DirectX. Available GPUs include AMD Radeon Instinct MI25 and NVIDIA Tesla M60 GPUs.
* ND-series—optimized for deep learning training scenarios and inference. Available GPUs include NVIDIA Tesla P40, Intel Skylake, and Intel Broadwell GPUs.

Google Cloud

Although Google Cloud doesn’t offer dedicated instances with GPUs, it does enable you to connect GPUs to existing instances. This works with standard instances and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) instances. It also enables you to deploy node pools, including GPUs. Support is available for NVIDIA Tesla V100, P4, T4, K80, and P100 GPUs.

Another option in Google Cloud is access to TensorFlow processing units (TPUs). These units are made of multiple GPUs. TPUs are designed to perform matrix multiplication quickly and can provide performance similar to Tensor Core enabled Tesla V100 instances. Currently, PyTorch provides partial support for TPUs.

Learn more in our detailed guide about cloud deep learning

Kubernetes in the Cloud
Kubernetes on AWS
Kubernetes lets you use existing on-premises and cloud-based tools to run containerized applications. It can manage clusters of AWS EC2 instances, deploying, running, maintaining, and scaling containers on EC2 instances.

AWS helps you easily manage Kubernetes infrastructure with Amazon EC2 or employ Amazon EKS for automatic provisioning and management. You can also leverage community-backed integrations to AWS services, such as IAM, VPC, and service discovery.

Learn more in our in-depth guide to Kubernetes on AWS.

Kubernetes on Azure
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) enables you to deploy a managed Kubernetes cluster in the Azure cloud. AKS is a hosted Kubernetes service that reduces the operational overhead and complexity of managing Kubernetes by managing these responsibilities. Azure handles health monitoring and maintenance and manages Kubernetes masters, so you can focus on managing and maintaining agent nodes.

Learn more in our in-depth guide to Kubernetes on Azure.

Kubernetes on Google Cloud
Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is an orchestration system for Docker containers and container clusters running in Google’s public cloud. It is based on Kubernetes, which Google originally developed for container management. You can use the gcloud CLI or the Google Cloud Platform Console to interact with this service.

GKE employs a group of instances to run Kubernetes. It allocates a master node to manage a cluster of Docker containers and runs a Kubernetes API server that interacts with the cluster and performs various tasks, including scheduling containers. A cluster may also include one or more additional nodes that run a Docker runtime and kubelet agent to manage containers.

IaaS Storage Optimization with NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP
NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, the leading enterprise-grade storage management solution, delivers secure, proven storage management services on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Cloud Volumes ONTAP supports up to a capacity of 2 PB, and supports various use cases such as file services, databases, DevOps or any other enterprise workload, with a strong set of features including high availability, data protection, storage efficiencies, Kubernetes integration, and more.

In particular, Cloud Volumes ONTAP provides Cloud Manager, a UI and APIs for management, automation and orchestration, supporting hybrid & multi-cloud architectures.

See Additional Guides on Key IaaS and Cloud Computing Topics
NetApp, together with several partner websites, has authored a large repository of content that can help you learn about many aspects of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Check out the articles below for objective, concise reviews of key cloud computing topics.

Authored by Run.AI

Learn how IaaS services make hardware acceleration more accessible for deep learning and machine learning projects. Discover Graphical Processing Units (GPU) computing resources offered by major cloud providers.

See top articles in our guide on cloud deep learning:

Authored by NetApp

Learn about cloud migration and what major challenges to expect when implementing a cloud migration strategy in your organization.

See top articles in our cloud migration strategy guide:

Authored by NetApp

Learn about Amazon’s basic framework for migration, and how to plan for common challenges that affect almost every migration project.

See top articles in our AWS migration guide:

Authored by NetApp

Discover how highly available systems are reliable and resilient and see how AWS can help you achieve high availability for cloud workloads, across 3 dimensions.

See top articles in our AWS high availability guide:

Authored by NetApp

Learn what is AWS EBS and how to perform common EBS operations. Including five highly useful EBS features that can help you optimize performance and billing.

See top articles in our guide to AWS EBS:

Authored by NetApp

Learn how AWS cost optimization works, free Amazon tools that can help manage costs, and best practices for reducing your cloud bill.

See top articles in our AWS cost optimization guide:

Authored by NetApp

Learn about AWS EFS, your backup options, how to optimize performance, see a brief comparison of EFS vs EBS vs S3, and discover how Cloud Volumes ONTAP can help.

See top articles in our guide to AWS EFS:

Authored by Lumigo

Learn about the AWS ecosystem on its services, understand the core Lambda functionalities, and discover AWS Lambda monitoring functionalities.

See top articles in our guide to the AWS serverless ecosystem:

Authored by Spot.io

Learn how Amazon prices its huge variety of cloud computing services, including detailed guides about popular services like Fargate, ECS, and EMR.

See top articles in our guide on AWS Pricing:

Authored by Spot.io

Learn about automated mechanisms that let you add or remove AWS resources according to the current needs of your applications and workloads.

See top articles in our guide on AWS Autoscaling:

Authored by Spot.io

Learn how Amazon prices its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, understand pricing for EC2 instances and learn how to estimate your future EC2 costs.

See top articles in our guide on AWS EC2 Pricing:

Authored by NetApp

Learn about aspects of considerations when implementing Azure migration: migration models, state assessment, storage configuration, security, and maintenance.

See top articles in our Azure migration guide:

Authored by NetApp

Learn about tools and practices that can help you manage and optimize costs on the Microsoft Azure cloud.

See top articles in our Azure cost management:

Authored by NetApp

High availability is one of the major benefits of cloud services. The guarantee that your data will remain accessible is critical to supporting high priority workloads and applications and is the reason many move to the cloud in the first place.

This guide explains what high availability is and how to optimize Azure high availability.

See top articles in our Azure high availability guide:

Authored by NetApp

Learn about all SAP solutions offered as a service on Azure, including HANA, S/4HANA, NetWeaver and Hybris, migration considerations and best practices.

See top articles in our guide to SAP on Azure:

Authored by NetApp

Learn how to use Linux on Azure, including guides for cloud-based enterprise Linux deployments and performance tips.

See top articles in our guide to Linux on Azure:

Authored by NetApp

Discover services and techniques for cloud-based HPC, including unique Azure HPC features and use cases.

See top articles in our guide to HPC on Azure:

Authored by NetApp

Learn what options are available for VDI on Azure. Understand how the architecture works and discover best practices for VDI deployments.

See top articles in our guide to VDI on Azure:

Authored by Spot.io

Learn how Microsoft Azure prices its services, how to estimate your future costs, and how to optimize costs and reduce your Azure bill.

See top articles in our guide on Azure Pricing:

Authored by NetApp

Learn how to migrate your workloads and data to Google Cloud, including in-depth comparisons between GCP and other cloud providers, tools, strategies, costs, and more.

See top articles in our guide on Google Cloud migration:

Authored by NetApp

Learn how VMware partners with public cloud providers to help users run virtualized workloads in a cloud environment.

See top articles in our guide on VMware Cloud:

Authored by NetApp

Learn about Amazon FSx, a fully managed service that lets you run managed Windows Server and Lustre file systems to support high performance and high throughput data scenarios.

Authored by NetApp

Learn how Google Cloud prices its cloud services and what you can do to optimize and reduce your costs in Google Cloud.

Authored by NetApp

Learn how to run Kubernetes clusters and containerized applications in Azure, using the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Container Instances (ACI), and related services.

Authored by NetApp

Learn how to run Kubernetes clusters and containerized applications in AWS, using the Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Amazon Fargate, and related services.

Authored by Spot.io

Learn about financial and economic aspects of cloud computing, how to optimize your cloud costs, and strategies for getting a better return on your cloud investments.

Multi Tenant Architecture

Authored by Frontegg

Additional IaaS Resources
See additional guides on IaaS topics authored by our partner websites.