Hi, Oracle is going down the cloud path really fast. Last week, I blogged a bit from an exchange on my user group forum where someone was asking about what exactly the cloud is. I’ll blog a bit on what I believe the cloud to be and some different offerings in the cloud. Then, I’ll update you on what Oracle is doing in the cloud and how this might be useful to you. Basically, the ‘cloud’ is a term used for accessing apps/data via a web browser, where these items are on a remote computer instead of your laptop or on-site computer. Years ago, we called this time sharing where a company would just pay for time used and not own the actual mainframe computing environment. So, remote processing is not new to the IT community. Let’s go over some terminology and next week I’ll focus a bit more on what Oracle is actually offering. This site is a good place to start: https://www.oracle.com/cloud/index.html Some useful terms are: SaaS PaaS DaaS IaaS Public Cloud Private Cloud On premise Off Premise SaaS is software as a service. This is where your entire application is remote-based, accessed via a web browser. If purchased, this is a complete application including data management, software configuration, OS and hardware configurations…are all managed for you…for a fee of course. Email packages such as Gmail and software like WebEx fall into this category easily. PaaS is process as a service. This is more like locally-hosted applications but hosted remotely. Company developers still build and maintain these applications but the remote nature and the ability to add hardware resources as needed is a snap. Again, the company is not buying the hardware environment, just using time and resources on it. DaaS is data or database as a service. Oracle includes Data schema in this category. I’ll discuss these flavors in this series. Data as a Service is where just your data is hosted remotely. This is where most of Oracle’s offerings fall. IaaS is infrastructure as a service. This is where a company pays to have the entire IT environment managed by another hosting company, not just the application (as in PaaS) or just the database (as in DaaS). The upside here is the entire environment is managed by someone else, someone else’s team of technical people, etc. These web-based environments scale easily. You need more horse power, you simply purchase more CPU time/CPU’s. You need more space…no more ordering additional disk systems, you simply specify the storage requirements and pay as you go. Public Cloud is where multiple different people from different companies can use an application. Gmail would be a classic example here. There is isolation between the user accounts (ie: you cannot see Johnny’s email traffic from your account, nor do you even know that Johnny’s account is even there…) but they all use the same interface and software and it is all managed for you. Private Cloud is more like the intranet. It’s just for a particular company, no non-company people can use or access the system. Security is usually the main concern of the cloud-based applications and security is probably better with this option. Oracle used these 2 terms a lot last fall…you will hear them quite a bit. On-premise is where the computing environment is hosted by your company and off-premise is where the computing environment is hosted by another…and is remote…ie: the cloud computing model. Next week I’ll start diving into what Oracle has to offer then will jump into Oracle’s hardware offerings. Dan Hotka Oracle ACE Director Author/Instructor/CEO
↧