Cloud architecture is essential for properly designing your information system. Discover in this article everything you need to know about cloud architecture.
Summary
What is cloud architecture?
First, let’s distinguish two concepts:
- The cloud resources themselves, including the infrastructure, services, and features provided by your Cloud provider
- How you use these cloud resources to create your information system
The architect deals with the second point. Just as when you hire an architect to draw the plans for your future house, cloud architecture maps out all the technologies and components essential for the smooth operation of your information system in the Cloud. Once integrated and connected according to your company’s needs, these elements offer a highly available online service capable of running all your applications. This is how you can store, share, and access your resources in real time.
What is included in a cloud architecture?
First, let’s go back to how the Cloud provider offers its services. It does so through:
- A “front-end“, the interface that allows you to deploy, interconnect, and configure the components of your IS.
- A “back-end“, the hidden side, is the management by your provider of the hardware, security, network, and of course, the power supply of your Cloud resources.
Let’s continue our comparison with building a house. In all plans, you will find essential elements: foundations, roofs, openings to the outside… So, in the Cloud, the architect draws their plans and Cloud engineers implement them on the Cloud. So, if we transpose these prerequisites to the Cloud environment, what would be the essential components for good cloud architecture?
- Good identity and access management to ensure that only individuals pre-identified by the company can access resources.
- An execution environment, or runtime, capable of running applications independently of each other.
- An operating system establishing links between the different applications and components of the cloud architecture, allowing them to interact with each other
- Servers, also called “virtual machines”, offering more flexibility and good compartmentalisation of resources to deploy your applications.
- Storage (including databases), to host all the company’s data flexibly to meet its evolving needs.
- A network infrastructure, crucial for ensuring connectivity between different components, the security of data in transit, and efficient access to your applications worldwide.
Cloud responsibility model
Depending on your company’s needs and constraints, choose between an IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), or SaaS (Software as a Service) model. These types of services vary according to your needs: do you want your Cloud service provider to provide you with its infrastructure, turnkey tools to create your own applications, or ready-to-use cloud applications?
What are the different types of cloud architecture?
Each cloud architecture is unique and created according to your company’s specific needs: what is your industry? What material, technological, and human resources do you have at your disposal? What is your goal in migrating to a Cloud environment? However, there are “major types” of cloud architectures, which can be mentioned as follows:
- Public Cloud: for simplicity, your company can subscribe to an offer from a Cloud service provider, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure, to name the most famous. Your resources are then physically stored with this provider, along with those of other companies. However, they remain isolated from one another. This sharing of architectures makes Public Cloud a cost-effective solution that relieves your company from the costs of material investment, energy, and maintenance.
- Private Cloud: depending on its industry, a company may be subject to strict regulations in terms of security. Choosing Private Cloud means taking on the responsibility of hosting in its own premises or soliciting the infrastructure of a Cloud service provider for exclusive use.
- Hybrid Cloud: probably the solution offering the most flexibility, Hybrid Cloud allows companies to juggle between Public and Private Cloud services, according to their needs and the sensitivity of their resources.
- Multi-cloud: this architecture addresses any risk of dependency on a single Cloud service provider, by hosting its data with different providers. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket!
What are the advantages of cloud architecture?
More and more companies have started or are starting a migration to the Cloud, and for good reason! Cloud architecture has many advantages, among them:
More flexibility
Cloud services offer companies the opportunity to manage their resources and adapt their capacity according to their needs in real-time. It is also the possibility to innovate more quickly with high-value-added services that are ready to use (such as with Artificial Intelligence).
Cost optimisation
By choosing a Public Cloud architecture, organisations reduce their hardware expenses related to Cloud infrastructure. The price of offers subscribed from Cloud service providers most often depends on the resources consumed by the company, which only pays for its actual consumption.
Greater accessibility
Available via the internet, cloud services allow anyone within the same organisation, and with access, to exploit the company’s resources from anywhere, thus simplifying collaboration.
Enhanced security
To counter companies’ fears of migrating to a Cloud environment, service providers have developed high-security rules, guaranteeing the protection of data and resources.
Disaster recovery and maintenance offer
Cloud service providers perform regular backups of company data, to ensure operational continuity in case of failure. Maintenance and infrastructure updates are also taken care of by the provider, leaving companies free to focus on their core business.
Do you need a cloud architect?
Some situations related to your Cloud environment may require the intervention of a cloud architect. Among them, we find most often:
- Difficulties in evolving your infrastructure as your organisation grows or experiences rapid growth. The cloud architect will adapt your infrastructure and propose improvement axes according to your challenges.
- Poor management of IT resources that compromises the performance of your cloud services but also causes excessive costs in use (FinOps). A cloud architect is able to identify bottlenecks and optimise your resources without compromising the performance of your Cloud environment.
- Defining security rules in your Cloud is also a task that a cloud architect can accomplish.
- Starting a migration to the cloud, distributing resources between different services, or benefiting from automated solutions for the deployment and execution of your resources are all tasks to entrust to your future cloud architect.
In addition to architecture, don’t forget to establish clear governance and processes for your teams.
Qim info: your cloud architect to support you
Have you identified blockages in your information system that could be optimised by implementing Cloud solutions?
At Qim info, our experts offer tailor-made cloud consulting services, in line with your needs and the context of your company.
Our cloud architects help you design, build, migrate, and optimise your Cloud infrastructure to transform your way of working and thus reduce your time-to-market while ensuring the efficiency of your IT system. Qim info also offers support (maintenance, incident resolution, updates) for your Cloud infrastructure.
Whether you choose a delegation mode of service or as a “project”, hiring an IT services and consulting company presents many advantages. Benefit from the expertise of carefully selected cloud architects for the period necessary for the proper implementation of your cloud environment.
At Qim info, our team of Cloud specialists supports you at every step of your project:
- Conducting a feasibility study and cost analysis for migration to the Cloud: our multi-supplier experience allows us to define your new ready-to-use architecture, facilitate migration, and optimise costs.
- Kubernetes, docker: we orchestrate your containers and microservices for better availability of your information system
- Security and real-time monitoring: we organise the observability of your Cloud to facilitate its monitoring, analysis, and security. We implement tools like WAF, SIEM, DLP, and zero-trust architecture.