What are Public Clouds?
Public clouds are platforms offered by third-party providers that use the standard cloud computing model to make resources available to users remotely. These resources can be anything from virtual machines (VMs) to applications and storage. They are offered over the public Internet, making them available to anyone who wishes to use or purchase them through a variety of pricing schemes.
Public clouds can be free, paid through a subscription, or through on-demand pricing such as a pay-per-usage model. This versatile method allows customers to pay for only the CPU cycles, storage, or bandwidth that they use.
Clouds and cloud computing have become essential when it comes to IT infrastructures. Public clouds usually have tons of space available and they are often recommended when pursuing software development and other types of collaborative projects, like web app development. There are three different types of cloud computing services, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS all have varying degrees of service, starting with managing a physical infrastructure only to providing a fully developed software solution.
Public clouds have become a popular choice over private clouds, as they provide a variety of benefits for their clients. They are known to be cost-effective, do not require long-term contracts or commitments, are highly scalable, are location-independent, do not require maintenance, and enable agility.
Public clouds also lead to DevOps success. Public clouds and DevOps are known to have a symbiotic relationship. Although they are independent of one another, they can be used together to deliver business value through IT. Public clouds providers aid DevOps by offering increased accessibility, by enabling agility, by offering stronger security, by offering on-demand resources, and by constantly searching for new services to help developers’ ability to complete their work easier.
Why You Should Use a Public Cloud (in general)
Public clouds offer numerous benefits and advantages for its users.
Public clouds are cost-effective.
They can save companies from expenses like purchasing, managing, and maintaining on-premises hardware and application infrastructure. They are also typically available to customers as a “free” service. Online storage services usually follow a subscription-based payment program, where the first 5GB of storage is free, followed by low monthly rates for additional storage capacity. Public clouds often reduce the overall costs for the company by centralizing the operation, management, and maintenance of the server resources and sharing them across all cloud services.
Public clouds do not require long-term contracts or commitments.
As mentioned earlier, public clouds offer pay-per-usage plans. These are perfect for small and medium-sized companies that do not necessarily know what storage or bandwidth capacity they need. It allows the companies to increase their cloud storage capacity as their need for it increases, making public cloud storage easy.
Public clouds are scalable.
Using public clouds ensures that the infrastructure is always optimally used. Since cloud resources are always on-demand, the public cloud takes care of the peaks and drops in the workload by optimizing the hardware needs of its data centres.
Public clouds are location-independent.
Since public cloud services are offered over the Internet, it can be accessed anywhere in the world. This allows the client to utilize cloud services wherever they are located.
Public clouds do not require maintenance on the part of the company.
The service provider is responsible for all of the cloud maintenance, including hardware, software, and networks. So, companies do not need to worry about keeping their infrastructure up-to-date. The infrastructure can be run with minimal staff, so the company can focus more on what matters.
Public clouds enable agility.
They reduce waste that impedes speed and focus. Instead of focusing on commodity work, they can spend time working on adding company-specific value to their web-apps. Furthermore, public clouds make IT infrastructure more pliable, allowing companies to have digital service relationships with their clients.
Public clouds have fewer operational issues.
By using a public cloud service, the company will be using a standardized service, reducing issues and defects. The same service is deployed repeatedly, and the same result occurs each time. Therefore less time is spent by developers on operational issues.
Public clouds make it easier to start business innovation initiatives.
With readily available public cloud services, new business models arise. The company can gain value, thus creating a new revenue stream.
Public clouds can be easily set-up.
Companies can set up their cloud in a matter of hours. The service is bought on the Internet. Then, the cloud is deployed and configured remotely. All you need is an Internet connection to access the public cloud provider’s website.
How Public Clouds Lead to DevOps Success
With the benefits of public clouds being undeniable, it comes as no surprise that public clouds lead to DevOps Success.
Public clouds offer increased accessibility.
Since public clouds are location-independent, developers can use them to build applications anywhere. Development teams can get their work done wherever they are and whenever they want to. There is increased development flexibility.
Public clouds offer stronger security.
The providers’ public clouds usually have highly advanced security, as they need to make sure that the cloud is as secure as possible for their clients. Since most companies do not have staff readily available 24/7 for maintenance, having advanced security is a necessity.
Public clouds offer on-demand resources.
Depending on the type of public cloud service a company chooses to use, such as PaaS, resources are readily available for the developers to use. So, the company does not need to spend time worrying about procuring the tools that the developers need. For public cloud services that do not have resources readily available, developers can provision resources on-demand.
Public clouds provide DevOps automation with a standard central platform.
This allows developers to be able to use the platform for testing, deployment, and production.
Public cloud service providers actively search for new services.
These services could be SSD instances, Big Data PaaS offerings, and release automation tools to help make developers’ ability to complete their work on applications easier. By finding these new services, the public cloud can help developers create functionally faster.
With the ease of use and practicality of public cloud computing, it is easy to see why the global market for public cloud computing has grown exponentially, skyrocketing from being worth only $6B USD 10 years ago to $236B USD as of 2020. Gartner projects the public cloud revenue will be $354.6B USD by 2022.
Are you ready to leverage the power of the public cloud? Our public cloud DevOps experts will help you take your infrastructure to the next level. Contact the stack.io team here.