In this post we show a couple of options when it comes to a cloud

deployment model. Depending on the needs of your organization some

options may suit you better than others.

Private Cloud

A private cloud is cloud infrastructure that only members of your organization

can utilize. It is typically owned and managed by the organization itself and

is hosted on premises but it could also be managed by a third party in a secure

datacenter. This deployment model is best suited for organizations that deal

with sensitive data and/or are required to uphold certain security standards by

various regulations.

Advantages:

• Organization specific

• High degree of security and level of control

• Ability to choose your resources (ie. specialized hardware)

Disadvantages:

• Lack of elasticity and capacity to scale (bursts)

• Higher cost

• Requires a significant amount of engineering effort

Public Cloud

Public cloud refers to cloud infrastructure that is located and

accessed over the public network. It provides a convenient way to

burst and scale your project depending on the use and is typically

pay-per-use. Popular examples include Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure.

Advantages:

• Scalability/Flexibility/Bursting

• Cost effective

• Ease of use

Disadvantages:

• Shared resources

• Operated by third party

• Unreliability

• Less secure

Hybrid Cloud

This type of cloud infrastructure assumes that you are hosting your system both

on private and public cloud . One use case might be regulation requiring data

to be stored in a locked down private data center but have the application

processing parts available on the public cloud and talking to the private

components over a secure tunnel.

Another example is hosting most of the system inside a private cloud and having

a clone of the system on the public cloud to allow for rapid scaling and

accommodating bursts of new usage that would otherwise not be possible on the

private cloud.

Advantages:

• Cost effective

• Scalability/Flexibility

• Balance of convenience and security

Disadvantages:

• Same disadvantages as the public cloud

Multi-Cloud

This option is a variant of the hybrid cloud but we refer to it when we mean

"using multiple public cloud providers". It is mostly used for mission critical

systems that want to minimize the amount of down time if a specific service on

a particular cloud goes down (e.g., the S3 outage of 2017 that took down a lot

of web services with it). This option is arguably the most advanced option and

sacrifices convenience for security and reliability. It requires significant

expertise and engineering effort to get right since most platforms vary widely

between the type of resources and services that they provide in subtle ways.

When choosing a cloud deployment model weigh the advantages and disadvantages of

each option as it relates to your business objectives.

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