Academic Integrity: tutoring, explanations, and feedback — we don’t complete graded work or submit on a student’s behalf.

As cloud computing increases in popularity, enhanced features are continually be

ID: 3772830 • Letter: A

Question

As cloud computing increases in popularity, enhanced features are continually being added. For example, Amazon Web Services (AWS) supports a Virtual Private Cloud infrastructure through which organizations can create a net- work topology in the AWS cloud that closely resembles their own physical data center. Research AWS’s Virtual Private Cloud or another cloud vendor’s similar offering. What are your impressions? Would this be something that an organization should consider? What are its technical limitations? Write a one- page summary of your research.

Explanation / Answer

Selecting one cloud over the other will come down to the wants and needs of each individual customer, and the workloads they are running. In fact it is often the case that organisations will use both providers within different parts of their operations, for different use cases.

However there are a number of differentiating factors that separate the approaches of the two firms, which can help end-users consider which is right for them.

It is worth starting by looking at the services offered by the two firms. Both AWS and Azure offer similar capabilities to some degree, along the lines of compute, storage and networking.

They share the common elements of a public cloud: self-service and instant provisioning, autoscaling, plus security, compliance and identify management features.

Both companies also continually invest in meeting demand for new cloud services. This has resulted in more mature analytics offerings. For example, support for Hadoop clusters are provided by both AWS (Elastic Map Reduce) and Azure (HDInsight).

AWS and Microsoft have added machine learning tools and a number of features targeted at the Internet of Things, while customers can tap either cloud to variously build a mobile app or even create high performance computing environment depending on their needs.

Meanwhile the recent buzz around containers is catered for too, with both providers supporting Docker services. Microsoft has also been also been creating its own Hyper-V container technology that it will run in on-premise data centres as part of its forthcoming Windows Server 2016 release. Read next: What to expect from Windows Server 2016.

Some of the default soft limits include:

1. EC2 Instance – Default Limit: 20 per region
2. EBS Volume – Default Limit: 5000 volumes or an aggregate size of 20 TiB
3. Elastic IP – Default Limit: 5 per region
4. Elastic Load Balancer – Default Limit: 10
5. High I/O Instance – Default Limit: 2
6. Virtual Private Cloud – Default Limit: 5