Cloud Services

In this post, we have tried to cover some important types of cloud services in general. Due to the vastness of cloud technology services implementations and the rapid phase in which innovation is happening, it is impossible to provide an exhaustive list of available cloud services in a single blog. We will be covering each topics in detail separately in our blog series. 

Secure Reliable Storage at low cost

Off line backup in a remote location is an important step in Disaster Recovery for the individual and the enterprise. Cloud storage gives unlimited space to store your backups and other files off line at 99.999999999% reliability. TIme of expiry of files can also be specified after which time the file will be automatically deleted or removed to another cheaper storage with a delay in retrieval. Again after an expiry date the file will be automatically deleted. The files can be encrypted by the cloud provider’s key or your key.

Encrypted personal or official storage with ACL support - Employees or groups of employees can have their own storage with Encryption &  Access Regulations to ensure confidentiality of the files they work with. Windows Explorer like interface and Eclipse plugin exists to seamlessly access the secure storage.

Static websites can be hosted directly from the storage without a webserver installation from the client’s part.

Content distribution & Software Delivery  - Store Photo, Videos, Music or your own software for people to upload and download and earn money by charging them for it.

Store Data which can be accessed using Bit-Torrent.

Versioning of objects available and you can use it to preserve, retrieve and restore every version of every object in your storage.

Store big attachments from your website by directly uploading and downloading from the storage thus freeing the web server from heavy loads.

Virtual Servers & Virtual Private Networks in the cloud

Provide cost effective Virtual Servers in the cloud to run custom software or services. A no. of Virtual Machine configurations available Optimized for 1) Computing power 2) Storage Capacity 3) Memory Intensive 4) Network Optimized 5) Economic Pricing from different vendors to suit various needs

Firewall services for Virtual Servers with easy configuration interface.

Load balancer services for Load balancing Virtual Servers inside and outside Virtual Private Networks elastically for increasing and decreasing network traffic.

Provision to Autoscale application servers elastically as network traffic increases or decreases to contain varying loads at different times.

Deploy scalable application spanning more than two Data centres in different geographical locations scaling to support millions of users without down time or latency

Create a Virtual Private Network & Public/Private subnets in cloud and launch servers in them for increased security and configure to access them only through a VPN connection from your company network.

Provide Content Delivery Network services according to use case

Provide ability to run and manage containers ( eg: docker ) with Auto scaling in the cloud.

Provide Elastic File System services with which storage capacity is elastic, growing and shrinking automatically as you add and remove files, so your applications have the storage they need, when they need it. Multiple Virtual Servers can access an Elastic  file system at the same time, providing a common data source for workloads and applications running on more than one instance.You pay only for the storage used by your file system. You don't need to provision storage in advance and there is no minimum fee or setup cost.

Storage Gateway Services for connecting an on-premises software appliance with cloud-based storage to provide seamless and secure integration between an organization’s on-premises IT environment and Cloud Storage Infrastructure. The service allows you to securely store data in the  cloud for scalable and cost-effective storage. The Storage Gateway services supports industry-standard storage protocols that work with your existing applications. It provides low-latency performance by maintaining frequently accessed data on-premises while securely storing all of your data encrypted in the cloud.

Using Direct Connect Services you can establish private connectivity between the cloud and your datacenter, office, or colocation environment, which in many cases can reduce your network costs, increase bandwidth throughput, and provide a more consistent network experience than Internet-based connections.

Cloud DNS Server provides a highly available & scalable DNS web service with DNS health checks to route traffic to healthy endpoints or to independently monitor the health of your application and its endpoints

Intelligent Responder is a compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the compute resources for you, making it easy to build applications that respond quickly to new information. This service  starts running your code within milliseconds of an event such as an image upload, in-app activity, website click, or output from a connected device. You can also use this service to create new back-end services where compute resources are automatically triggered based on custom requests. You pay only for the requests served and the compute time required to run your code. Billing is metered in increments of 100 milliseconds, making it cost-effective and easy to scale automatically from a few requests per day to thousands per second.

Database Services in the Cloud

Database Services in the Cloud helps you concentrate on your application and not worry about the Database deployment. You can deploy your Database server in More than one Data Centre for one of them to act as a hot backup for other to provide seamless failover. The Slaves can be placed in a Data Centres on different geographical locations. Current databases include but not limited to

MySQL

PostgreSQL

Oracle

CouchDB

DocumentDB

MS SQL Server

Aurora - MySQL compatible, much better performance, low pricing

DynamoDB - Scalable NOSQL Datastore

Redis - In memory cache.

Redshift - fast, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse, usually for big data analytics, OLAP, based on postgresql 8.0.2

Cassandra

MongoDB

BigTable

Administration & Security

Hosted Directory Service is a managed service that allows you to connect your cloud resources with an existing on-premises Microsoft Active Directory or to set up a new, stand-alone directory in the Cloud. Connecting to an on-premises directory is easy and once this connection is established, all users can access cloud resources and applications with their existing corporate credentials. You can also launch managed, Samba-based directories in a matter of minutes, simplifying the deployment and management of Linux and Microsoft Windows workloads in the Cloud.

Identity and Access Management (IAM) enables you to securely control access to Cloud services and resources for your users. Using IAM, you can create and manage Cloud users and groups, and use permissions to allow and deny their access to Cloud resources.

CloudTrail is a web service that records Cloud Services API calls for your account and delivers log files to you. The recorded information includes the identity of the API caller, the time of the API call, the source IP address of the API caller, the request parameters, and the response elements returned by the Cloud service.

With CloudTrail, you can get a history of Cloud Services API calls for your account, including API calls made via the Cloud Management Console, Cloud SDKs, command line tools, and higher-level Cloud services (eg: Infrastructure as Code). The Cloud services API call history produced by CloudTrail enables security analysis, resource change tracking, and compliance auditing.

Configuration Services is a fully managed service that provides you with an Cloud resource inventory, configuration history, and configuration change notifications to enable security and governance. With Configuration Services you can discover existing Cloud resources, export a complete inventory of your Cloud resources with all configuration details, and determine how a resource was configured at any point in time. These capabilities enable compliance auditing, security analysis, resource change tracking, and troubleshooting.

Cloud Watch Services is a monitoring service for cloud resources and the applications you run on the cloud. You can use Cloud Watch Services to collect and track metrics, collect and monitor log files, and set alarms. Cloud Watch Services can monitor Cloud resources such as ,  Database instances, as well as custom metrics generated by your applications and services, and any log files your applications generate. You can use Cloud Watch Services to gain system-wide visibility into resource utilization, application performance, and operational health. You can use these insights to react and keep your application running smoothly.

Service Catalog provides a single location where organizations can centrally manage catalogs of IT services. With Service Catalog you can control which IT services and versions are available, the configuration of the available services, and permission access by individual, group, department, or cost center.

Deployment & Management

PaaS (Platform as a Service) services in the cloud allows users to create applications and push them to a definable set of Cloud services, including Virtual Servers, Storage Services, Notification Services , Monitoring Services, auto scaling, and scalable load balancers.

SecDevOps Application Management services makes it easy to deploy and operate applications of all shapes and sizes. You can define the application’s architecture and the specification of each component including package installation, software configuration and resources such as storage. Start from templates for common technologies like application servers and databases or build your own to perform any task that can be scripted. this service includes provides automation to scale your application based on time or load and dynamic configuration to orchestrate changes as your environment scales.

Infrastructure as Code enables you to script your infrastructure details in json or other language. The enabling of your scripts result in provisioning Virtual Servers, Databases, Storage and other services  as mentioned in the script. Template scripts are available to learn and modify for use in your environment.

Automate Code Deployment coordinates application deployments to instances. Instances are groups of one or more Virtual Servers in the cloud or on-premises or both. It provides. It provides

Automated deployments

Minimize down time

Centralized Console

Easy Adoption

Managed Source Control services are cloud hosted Version Control Systems.

Git

Subversion

CVS

Mercurial

Bazaar

Team Foundation

Visual Source Safe

CodePipeline is a continuous delivery service for fast and reliable application updates. CodePipeline builds, tests, and deploys your code every time there is a code change, based on the release process models you define. This enables you to rapidly and reliably deliver features and updates. You can easily build out an end-to-end solution by using our pre-built plugins for popular third-party services like GitHub or integrating your own custom plugins into any stage of your release process. With CodePipeline, you only pay for what you use. There are no upfront fees or long-term commitments.

Cloud Hosted Data Analytics, Big Data &  Data Flow Services

Cloud hosted and Managed Hadoop Framework.

Real time process of streaming Big Data. Apache Spark hosted in Cloud

Orchestration for Data driven workflows in the Cloud

Machine Learning in Cloud to build smart applications quickly and easily

Application Services

Cloud hosted Message queue service is a fast, reliable, scalable, fully managed message queuing service. This service makes it simple and cost-effective to decouple the components of a cloud application. You can use this service to transmit any volume of data, at any level of throughput, without losing messages or requiring other services to be always available.

Work Flow Services - If your app's steps take more than 500 milliseconds to complete, you need to track the state of processing, and you need to recover or retry if a task fails, Work Flow Services can help you.

AppStream Services  enables you to stream your existing Windows applications from the cloud, reaching more users on more devices, without code modifications. With AppStream, your application will be deployed and rendered on Cloud infrastructure and the output is streamed to mass-market devices, such as personal computers, tablets, and mobile phones. Because your application is running in the cloud, it can scale to handle vast computational and storage needs, regardless of the devices your customers are using.

Scalable Transcoder is media transcoding in the cloud. It is designed to be a highly scalable, easy to use and a cost effective way for developers and businesses to convert (or “transcode”) media files from their source format into versions that will playback on devices like smartphones, tablets and PCs.

Email Sending SMTP service is a cost-effective outbound-only email-sending service built on a reliable and scalable infrastructure with which you can send transactional email, marketing messages, or any other type of high-quality content and you only pay for what you use. Along with high deliverability, this cloud service provides easy, real-time access to your sending statistics and built-in notifications for bounces, complaints, and deliveries to help you fine-tune your cloud-based email-sending strategy.

Cloud Search Service is a managed service in the Cloud that makes it simple and cost-effective to set up, manage, and scale a search solution for your website or application.

CloudSearch supports 34 languages and popular search features such as highlighting, autocomplete, and geospatial search.

API Gateways  is a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale. With a few clicks in the Management Console, you can create an API that acts as a “front door” for applications to access data, business logic, or functionality from your back-end services, such as workloads running on Virtual Servers,  or code running on any Web application. API Gateway handles all the tasks involved in accepting and processing up to hundreds of thousands of concurrent API calls, including traffic management, authorization and access control, monitoring, and API version management.

Mobile Services

Mobile User Identity and Data Synchronization Cloud Service  is a service that makes it easy to save mobile user data, such as app preferences or game state, in the Cloud without writing any backend code or managing any infrastructure. This service offers mobile identity management and data synchronization across devices. You can save data locally on users’ devices allowing your applications to work even when the devices are offline. You can also synchronize data across a user’s devices so that their app experience will be consistent regardless of the device they use. With this cloud service, you can focus on creating great app experiences instead of having to worry about building and managing a backend solution to handle user authentication, network state, storage, and sync.

Device Farm tests your Android, FireOS, IOS apps against your choice of real devices enabling you to. run tests across a large selection of physical devices in parallel from various manufacturers with varying hardware, OS versions and form factors. Unlike emulators, physical devices provide a more accurate understanding of how users interact with your app, by taking into account factors such as memory, CPU usage, location, and modifications done by manufactures and carriers to the firmware and software

With Mobile Analytics you can measure app usage and app revenue. By tracking key trends such as new vs. returning users, app revenue, user retention, and custom in-app behavior events, you can make data-driven decisions to increase engagement and monetization for your app. You can view key charts in the Mobile Analytics console and automatically export your app event data to cloud storage and run custom analysis with the software of your choice

Push Notification service  lets you send individual messages or to fan-out messages to large numbers of recipients. This cloud service  makes it simple and cost effective to send push notifications to mobile device users, email recipients or even send messages to other distributed services.You can send notifications to Apple, Google, Fire OS, and Windows devices, as well as to Android devices in China with Baidu Cloud Push. You can send SMS messages to mobile device users in the US or to email recipients worldwide.

Enterprise Applications

Your company desktops in the cloud - This is a managed desktop computing service in the cloud allowing customers to easily provision cloud-based desktops that allow end-users to access the documents, applications and resources they need with the device of their choice, including laptops, iPad, Kindle Fire, Android tablets, and zero clients. With a few clicks customers can provision a high-quality cloud desktop experience for any number of users

Email & Collaboration suite relieves you from the burden of maintaining mail servers, chat servers , and servers for other collaboration software. With this suite you can avail the scalable cloud hosted  services for Email, Document storage and management, spreadsheet, Project Management software and various others.

Artificial Intelligence

Cognitive computing systems understand natural language and are not programmed, they learn.

Offering solutions and applications across industries and organizations

Build cognitive services in the AI Developer Cloud.