Cloud - Infrastructure ~For the beginner
AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI
Author: Monowar Mukul (AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional, Azure Solutions Architect Expert, GCP Professional Cloud Architect, OCI Architect Professional)
This blog post will discuss Infrastructure options in four major public cloud service providers (AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI).
In today’s fast-paced world of technology, cloud computing has become an integral part of businesses, offering a wide range of services and features to meet various IT needs. Leading the pack are four major cloud providers: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure (Azure), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). These cloud giants have transformed how organizations store, manage, and leverage data, applications, and services.
In this comprehensive comparison, we will delve into the key aspects of these cloud providers, considering their infrastructure, services, and global presence. It’s crucial to note that the cloud landscape continuously evolves, with providers introducing new features and expanding their reach regularly. Therefore, referring to the official documentation and websites for the latest updates is essential. Nevertheless, this article aims to provide a foundational understanding of the offerings and infrastructure of AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI.
Infrastructure:
AWS
AWS has the concept of a Region, a physical location worldwide where we cluster data centers. We call each group of logical data centers an Availability Zone. Each AWS Region consists of multiple isolated and physically separate AZs within a geographic area.
An Availability Zone (AZ) is one or more discrete data centers with redundant power, networking, and connectivity in an AWS Region.
A Local Zone is an extension of an AWS Region in geographic proximity to your users. Local Zones have their connections to the internet and support AWS Direct Connect so that resources created in a Local Zone can serve local users with low-latency communications.
AWS Wavelength enables developers to build applications that deliver ultra-low latencies to mobile devices and end users. This extends the AWS cloud to a global network of 5G edge locations. Wavelength Zones provide a high-bandwidth, secure connection to the parent AWS Region, allowing developers to seamlessly connect to the full range of services in the AWS Region through the same APIs and toolsets.
Azure
An Azure region is a set of data centers deployed within a latency-defined perimeter and connected through a dedicated regional low-latency network.
It’s the concept of “region pairing.” Region pairing is the relationship between two Azure regions within the same geographic area to provide geographically redundant solutions.
An availability set is a logical grouping of VMs that allows Azure to understand how your application is built to provide redundancy and availability.
The underlying Azure platform assigns each virtual machine in your availability set an update domain and a fault domain. Each availability set can be configured with up to three fault domains and twenty update domains.
Update domains indicate logical groups of virtual machines and underlying physical hardware that can be rebooted simultaneously.
The Fault Domain's primary use case is If the Rack went down, something bad happened in that Rack in Azure.
Azure Edge Zones are footprint extensions of Azure, placed in densely populated areas. Azure Edge Zones support virtual machines (VMs), containers, and a select set of Azure services that let you run latency-sensitive and throughput-intensive apps close to your end users.
Point of Presence (POP): An Azure point of presence, often abbreviated as PoP, is an access point or physical location where traffic can enter or exit the Microsoft global network.
An Azure region is a set of datacenters deployed within a latency-defined perimeter and connected through a dedicated regional low-latency network.
It is a kind of clustering like a Windows cluster. It's there to protect the physical assets. The Fault Domain's primary use case is If the Rack went down, something bad happened in that Rack in Azure. Because the hardware broke, something broke in the switch, or something bad happened in the server of that Rack. This Rack can be repaired. However, Azure Fabric will detect that the Rack went down and move the workloads to some other Rack as long as you have another virtual machine in another fault domain.
An update domain is a logical group of underlying hardware that can undergo maintenance or be rebooted simultaneously. As you create VMs within an availability set, the Azure platform automatically distributes your VMs across these update domains.
Edge Zones:
Azure Edge Zones are footprint extensions of Azure, placed in densely populated areas. Azure Edge Zones support virtual machines (VMs), containers, and a select set of Azure services that let you run latency-sensitive and throughput-intensive apps close to your end users.
Point of Presence (POP):
An Azure point of presence, often called PoP, is an access point or physical location where traffic can enter or exit the Microsoft global network.
Azure Regional Network Gateway:
Regional network gateways are massively parallel, hyperscale data centers interconnect between data centers within a region — without the need to network each data center to the others in a region.
GCP
Regions: Regions are independent geographic areas that consist of zones.
Zones: A zone is a region's deployment area for Google Cloud resources. Zones should be considered a single failure domain within a region.
Each region has at least three or more zones. The main advantage of the zone is increasing availability and fault tolerance within the same region. Each zone has one or more discrete clusters (the distinct physical infrastructure that is housed in a data center).
Edge Points of Presence (POPs): where GCP connects Google’s network to the rest of the internet via peering. Edge Nodes (Google Global Cache, or GGC): Edge nodes represent the tier of Google’s infrastructure closest to the users.
With edge nodes, network operators and internet service providers deploy Google-supplied servers inside their network.
OCI
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is hosted in regions and availability domains.
A region is a localized geographic area, and an availability domain is one or more data centers located within a region. A region is composed of one or more availability domains.
A fault domain groups hardware and infrastructure within an availability domain.
Each availability domain contains three fault domains. Fault domains let you distribute your instances so that the instances are not on the same physical hardware within a single availability domain. A failure or Compute hardware maintenance event that affects one fault domain does not affect instances in other fault domains.
OCI Realms
Regions are grouped into realms. Your tenancy exists in a single realm and can access all regions that belong to that realm. You cannot access regions that are not in your realm. Currently, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has multiple realms.
Tenancy exists in a single realm and can access regions that belong to the realm. Currently, there are three realms in OCI:
Commercial Realm
· Govt Cloud: FedRAMP (Federal Risk & Authorization Management Program)
· Govt Cloud: IL5 Authorized (Impact Level 5)
Note: Not all services are currently supported in Govt Cloud.
Commercial vs. Government Region
There are two types of Regions:
· Commercial
· Government
a) Government Cloud: This is dedicated to government organizations only (federal compliance). Only government companies can access them with proper approvals, which Oracle will assign.
b) Commercial Cloud: It is not limited to one Organization, but it is publicly available.
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-regions-availability-zones.html
