The Benefits of Cloud Computing

Question 1

What are the two biggest considerations when deploying resources to the cloud?

Answer 1

Uptime (Availability)
Demand (Scale)

Question 2

What is and SLA and what are SLAs in the context of Azure

Answer 2

Service Level Agreements - These are contractual agreements between entities that define what one party pays and the other gets.

For Azure, they would create an uptime SLA stipulating 99% uptime or 99.9% uptime and any credit agreements if the SLA isn’t met.

Question 3

What is scalability?

Answer 3

The ability to add or remove resources dependent in order to meet demand.

Question 4

What is another benefit of scalability?

Answer 4

You only pay for what you use.

Question 5

What is vertical and horizontal scaling?

Answer 5

Vertical scaling is increasing processing power (CPU or RAM)

Horizontal scaling is deploying more instances (scaling out)

Question 6

What is reliability defined as?

Answer 6

The ability for a system to recover from failures and continue to function.

Question 7

How is provisioning resources to the cloud in Azure reliable?

Answer 7

You can deploy to multiple regions around the world so if there is a disaster in one area of the world, you will still be able to access your data from the other region.

Question 8

What makes up predictability?

Answer 8

Performance and cost.

Performance is defined as how well the resources are deployed in order to provide a positive customer experience. E.g. Load balancing, auto scaling and high availability.

Cost is focused on predicting cloud spend. Azure tools such as Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and Pricing calculator will help provide an estimate of cloud spend.

Question 9

What are the governance benefits of using the cloud?

Answer 9

Cloud-based auditing helps you check if the service is compliant, meets regulatory requirements and corporate standards. These resources can be updated to keep up with changes in regulation.

Question 10

What are the security benefits of using the cloud?

Answer 10

You can select the level of control you want over the security. i.e. Iaas puts all the control in the customer’s remit.

Cloud providers are proficient at dealing with DDoS attacks

Question 11

What are the two type of manageability in the cloud?

Answer 11

Management of the cloud

Management in the cloud

Question 12

What is included in Management of the cloud

Answer 12

This is management of the cloud resources:
- Auto-scaling
- Deploy resources based on a preconfigured template
- Monitor service health
- Receive automatic alerts based on metrics