Introduction

Cloud computing is reality now, defining how IT is handled not only in large, medium, and small enterprises but also in-consumer-facing businesses. The cloud itself is a familiar cliché, but when you attach computing, it brings with it a slew of services, vendors, and such, and the horizon includes virtual server providers, hosting providers, virtual storage and networking providers, hypervisor vendors, and private/public cloud providers.

The enterprise IT landscape has always been well-defined and segmented. Cloud computing initially started with replacing the traditional IT model; any business that had anything to do with computers and software (and that was almost 100 percent of businesses around the world) would need to acquire physical servers (often racks of them, depending on the size of the business) and storage and networking components. The business then had to construct a specially designed data center to deploy the components then configure, support, and manage the data center. Specialized IT skills were needed for executing a data center and managing it. Only large-scale enterprises and well-funded businesses could afford to undertake this. Even for large enterprises that had their own massive data centers for distributing enterprise applications to the workers and storing business data, operating the data center itself was a distraction that added to costs.

Cloud computing is a natural transition from this legacy model of enterprise IT to a world where computing can be sold and purchased just like any other commodity, where consumers would pay only for what they use, without steep up-front bills. You can now "order" 100 virtual servers and build enough computing capacity to run an application consumed by 100 million users over the Internet without owning a single server or writing a huge check to cover up-front costs. The cloud has not only ushered in a new age for enterprise IT, it has become the enabler technology for the Internet startups of today. It would be safe to say that a lot of very well-known Internet businesses wouldn't be possible if there were no cloud.

Who Should Read This Book

The global cloud market is expected to reach $270 billion by 2020. With most government and corporate IT moving into the cloud, this is the perfect time to equip yourself with the right skills to thrive in cloud computing.

Even though cloud computing has significantly lowered the barrier for businesses to use IT resources on demand, this does not mean that you can create your company's virtual data center in the cloud with just a few clicks. Building the right cloud infrastructure and efficiently managing and supporting it requires specialized skills. In addition to cloud practitioners, this book is for IT students who want to take a dive into understanding the concepts behind some of the key technologies that power modern cloud solutions and are essential for deploying, configuring, and managing private, public, and hybrid cloud environments.

Additionally, the topics covered in this book have been selected to address the CompTIA Cloud+ certification CV0-001, as indicated in the title of the book.

If you're preparing for the CompTIA Cloud+ certification CV0-001, this book is ideal for you. You can find more information about the CompTIA Cloud+ certification here:

http://certification.comptia.org/getCertified/certifications/cloudplus.aspx

How This Book is Organized

The topics in this book were chosen to cover a wide range of cloud technologies, deployment scenarios, and configuration issues as well as fundamental concepts that define modern cloud computing. Every chapter begins with an introduction and a list of the topics covered within it. To enhance your learning experience, we've included hands-on exercises and real-world scenarios. The book also includes a practice exam that covers the topics presented in each chapter, which will help you prepare well for the certification exam.

1. Chapter 1, "Understanding Cloud Characteristics," starts off with a detailed overview of the key terms related to cloud computing, including discussions of elasticity, metering/billing with the pay-as-you-grow model, network access, multitenancy, and a hybrid cloud scenario with cloud bursting, rapid deployment, and automation. The chapter also covers key concepts in object-based storage systems, including object IDs, metadata, access policies, and enabling access through REST APIs.
2. Chapter 2, "To Grasp the Cloud-Fundamental Concepts," takes a dive into the key piece of technology that makes it possible to enable cloud computing-virtualization. This chapter covers Type 1 and Type 2 hypervisors and their differences plus popular open-source and proprietary hypervisors that are available today with an overview of their key features. It also covers consumer versus enterprise use cases and workstation versus infrastructure virtualization. We discuss the key benefits of virtualization, like shared resources, elasticity, and complete resource pooling, including compute, storage, and network. The chapter ends with a discussion of the fundamentals of cloud computing in the context of virtualization technology.
3. Chapter 3, "Within the Cloud: Technical Concepts of Cloud Computing," takes a dive into the technical aspects of scalable computing, which include a comparison of traditional and cloud infrastructures, selecting the right infrastructure for building your own cloud, scaling and optimizing a data center, and economies of scale. At the end of the chapter, there's a section on cloud infrastructure, which covers open-source and proprietary solutions and includes a discussion on choosing between creating in-house tools or selecting third-party solutions and what drives the build versus buy decisions when it comes to cloud infrastructure.
4. Chapter 4, "Cloud Management," includes a plethora of scenarios, use cases, and issues associated with managing deployment and ongoing support for your cloud implementation. Broadly, this includes managing your own cloud, managing workloads in the cloud, and managing business data assets that live in the cloud, including data migration and secure storage and access of the data. The cloud is device agnostic, so controlling and managing access to the cloud by a plethora of devices-a concept known as BYOD-is also discussed.
5. Chapter 5, "Diagnosis and Performance Monitoring," discusses the aspects of a cloud implementation that you'll want to gauge and monitor. This includes performance metrics across compute (e.g., IOPS and load balancing), network (e.g., latency and bandwidth), and storage (e.g., file system performance and caching) resources. We also discuss best practices to achieve optimal performance with the hypervisor and common failure scenarios.
6. Chapter 6, "Cloud Delivery and Hosting Models," dives into the three main types of clouds in terms of delivery and access: public, private, and hybrid. On-premise and off-premise hosting options are discussed for all three types. At the end of the chapter is a discussion of the security and functionality aspects of these models.
7. Chapter 7, "Practical Cloud Knowledge: Install, Configure, and Manage," provides hands-on practical knowledge of the intricacies of setting up and managing your own cloud infrastructure. The chapter includes key discussions on creating a complete virtualized data center and configuring virtual compute, storage, and networking components. We'll discuss migrating existing data and compute workloads to a newly built cloud and provide an overview of the key virtual components of the cloud.
8. Chapter 8, "Hardware Management," walks through the physical hardware components that make up a cloud. Pros and cons of hardware design choices are discussed, including compute (e.g., number of cores and parallelism), storage (e.g., magnetic/spinning disk versus SSD), and networking (e.g., NIC quantities, types, and speed). Toward the end of the chapter, there's an in-depth discussion of cloud storage options.
9. Chapter 9, "Storage Provisioning and Networking," dives deep into creating virtualized storage, managing storage security and access, and provisioning models. We'll show you how to configure networking for the cloud, including how to create and configure multiple virtual networks within the same cloud, how to configure remote access to the cloud over the network, and how to optimize network performance. The chapter also includes some common troubleshooting scenarios as well as a discussion of selecting the right networking protocols and networking monitoring and alert mechanisms.
10. Chapter 10, "Testing and Deployment: Quality Is King," focuses on how QoS defines the success of the cloud. This chapter walks through extensive testing criteria for compute, storage, networking, and security/penetration. Test automation is also discussed. Deployment-related aspects like HA, multipathing, and load balancing are discussed toward the end of the chapter.
11. Chapter 11, "Cloud Computing Standards and Security," discusses the importance of standards for cloud implementation and management. The bigger portion of the chapter addresses the important topic of security in the cloud, including a discussion of the technical tools used to implement foolproof security for a cloud infrastructure. Encryption technologies are discussed along with implementation strategies for encryption in all states-communication, usage, and storage.
12. Chapter 12, "The Cloud Makes It Rain Money: The Business in Cloud Computing,"...