From the course: CCSK Cert Prep: 1 Cloud Architecture

On-demand self-service - Amazon Web Services (AWS) Tutorial

From the course: CCSK Cert Prep: 1 Cloud Architecture

Start my 1-month free trial

On-demand self-service

- In order for an IT computing environment to be referred to as cloud computing, a number of characteristics have to be met, including on-demand self-service. This allows cloud customers or tenants to provision or deprovision cloud resources at will instead of having to, for example, submit a request to the help desk, and wait for a help desk technician to deploy the cloud service. So this could involve adding additional cloud storage, deploying new cloud-based virtual machine instances or deploying new cloud-based databases and so on. So because the power to do this lies in the hands of the cloud tenant, it allows for quicker resource deployment than would otherwise be possible if a middle party were involved, such as an IT help desk that would actually get the ticket to create these resources. And so this can be done. This resource deployment and management over time can be done using GUI tools such as a mobile device app or a web browser or using command line tools, and at the software developer programmatic level they can make API calls to cloud services to create new resources, or to manage existing resources. In the case of Amazon web services, we can use the AWS management console, which is a web browser based tool, after we've signed up for an account, to deploy resources, and this is up to us as the cloud customer. For example, we could go down under All Services, click on EC2 if we wanted to launch or deploy a new virtual machine, and from here, we could click on Instances on the left to view existing instances, or we could click Launch Instances. The key being that we, as the cloud customer, determine when this happens. It's at our fingertips. But that's at the GUI level using a web browser interface. At the command line, or CLI interface, because I've already installed the AWS CLI tool, I could also deploy and manage resources using command line syntax such as aws ec2 run-instances, and I'm going to ask for help. This will give me help including details on how to actually deploy virtual machine instances in the AWS Cloud. So we have all the syntax listed here. So this would be one way to do this at the command line level, as opposed to doing it in the GUI. If you're more of a Microsoft PowerShell person, you could also, after having installed the appropriate cloud provider tools, you could also get help on PowerShell cmdlets, such as Get-Help New-Ec2Instance, let's say -Example, to get syntax examples of how to deploy and manage virtual machines from the PowerShell command line. So on-demand self-service then, puts control into the hands of the cloud customer. The cloud customer or tenant can plan service deployment, then deploy objects or resources such as virtual networks, followed by deploying resources like storage, then deploying virtual machines, then deploying cloud identities such as user accounts, and organizing them in groups in the cloud, and then assigning permissions to those users or groups, and then finally deploying additional security settings such as requiring multifactor authentication for cloud identities, and potentially enabling things like database encryption or cloud storage encryption.

Contents