Deployment Models & Multi-Cloud with Terraform
In this article, we will discuss the different deployment models in the IT infrastructure. Furthermore, explaining how we can achieve Multi-cloud with Terraform.
Article Outline Points:
- What is the Traditional Deployment Model?
- What is Cloud Deployment Model
- Choosing Cloud Model over Traditional Model
- Why is Multi-cloud trending?
- Multi-cloud with Terraform
What is the Traditional Deployment Model?
The traditional approach to IT is cumbersome, expensive, and full of risk. A data center is a place where many IT infrastructure pieces come together. These include desktop machines connected to particular networks via remote servers, which provide access for their business data and applications - all installed on-premises!
With every upgrade or addition, there are potential problems that could cause the system to fail-safe, so it is essential for these models if they want them to be long-lasting!
What is Cloud Deployment Model?
Cloud computing is an innovative way of gathering, storing, and processing information. As the name suggests, Cloud Computing is a collective combination of configurable system resources and advanced services delivered quickly using the internet. It provides lower power expenses, no capital costs, no redundancy, lower employee costs, increased collaboration.
Cloud Computing offers increased collaboration due to its decentralized nature - where everyone has equal rights to use their allotted share without interference. Moreover, clouds are accessible for anyone worldwide as the internet is like an endless cloud..!
Types of cloud deployment models:
Public Cloud: Public clouds are shared, on-demand infrastructure and resources delivered by a third-party provider.
Private Cloud: Private cloud is to have an on-demand, dedicated resource to an organization/individual. Private could be anything from hardware to software--it all depends on the organization's needs! Private clouds often coexist with traditional IT systems for organizations still using old ways to continue working without interruption during conversions.
Hybrid Cloud: Hybrid clouds are a popular and effective way to provide infrastructure for an enterprise, as it allows them the flexibility of using both public and private cloud services. While still having access to private data belonging solely to the bought organization.
Community Cloud: A community cloud is dedicated to a few organizations from the same "community." Thus, it is not a public cloud because it is not open for everyone, but it is not a private one because more than one user/organization uses it. An example of a community cloud could be a cloud that a few different banks use. Tailoring specific "community" requirements is the most significant advantage of a community cloud.
Multi-Cloud: A Multi-cloud is where the application's infrastructure could combine different providers' infrastructures. The multi-cloud can consist of public or private clouds and any other type together in one system!
Choosing Cloud over Traditional Model
- OnDemand Availability: We do not need to plan or worry about the infrastructure setup up-front like a traditional model. Thanks to cloud providers for making the infrastructure as creating it when need it on the fly and destroyed when no longer required.
- Operating costs: In a standard traditional model, an organization needs to maintain a server building and a back-office team to make the server not go down. Even it is a considerable upfront investment buying all the hardware. However, in the cloud model, the third-party providers maintain all the hardware take care of security upgrades, which help decrease downtime. The payment mode is like pay as per go used in the cloud model.
- Scalability: One of the most important reasons to switch to a cloud model from the traditional model is scalability. Looking for scalability of infrastructure up or down on the fly. The Cloud model provides excellent scalability. We need to buy the hardware in the traditional model and set it up as more traffic directs to our application. The organization must do all these things in the growth stage, which is very critical.
- Backup and Recovery: Cloud is already planned and automated with all the backup strategies & Plans. We can automatically set up the backup of all our application data in the cloud. In the traditional model, we need to set up the backup strategies manually.
Why is Multi-cloud trending?
Vendor lock-in: The idea of multi-cloud adoption has been gaining momentum in recent years, especially for businesses who want to avoid getting locked into a particular provider's infrastructure and pricing model.
As Gartner analyst Michael Warrilow puts it: "Most organizations adopt a multi-cloud strategy out of a desire to avoid vendor lock-in or to take advantage of best-of-breed solutions... We expect that most large organizations will continue to willfully pursue this approach."
Low Latency: The cloud is a convenient and cost-effective way to store data that needs access from multiple locations. The service provides an ability for this information when requested by end-users; delivery happens through servers located close enough to not cause any lag time between request completion (or latency). This feature makes the multi-cloud infrastructure ideal in situations the closest one being responsible for serving corporate needs! Even infrastructure is available in disparate locations.
Outlook: In today's fast-paced world, businesses adopt a multi-cloud strategy for improved performance and cost optimization. Containers are becoming more popular because they allow users to move workloads between different private or public clouds quickly without worrying about maintaining an internal registry of application configurations.
Multi-cloud with Terraform
Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as a code software tool that provides a consistent CLI workflow to manage hundreds of cloud services. Terraform codifies cloud APIs into declarative configuration files. Learn more about Infrastructure as a code here.
Applications deployment can happen across multiple platforms for fault tolerance and disaster recovery using an orchestration tool. The availability of these tools is vendor-specific, so it may be challenging to find one that will work with every cloud provider out there. However, they are becoming more commonplace as we move forward into the future.
Terraform is cloud-agnostic. Terraform helps combine all components and need to build and launch application infrastructure by ourselves. A server from AWS, DNS from Cloudflare, and a Postgres database from Heroku creation can happen using a single configuration file.
Terraform handles all the challenges like managing the scale, heterogeneity of the providers & dependencies management. Terraform also provides an excellent GUI workspace environment to manage the developers, operators, variables and run the terraform scripts.
Even the terraform provides a great feature that includes policy as code in the infrastructure template.
More about Terraform Read here
