Recently completed a certification on cloud computing from Vskills. It is a vendor neutral certification and gives a good overview of all available cloud offerings. The study material starts by explaining the evolution of Cloud computing.right from Mainframes , Distributed and Virtualization eras.
As you might already know, over the last decade virtualization techniques have come of age and commodity hardware has also matured. Customers whose main focus is not IT, feel burdened by IT overhead costs like manpower requirements, Datacenter up keep, power requirements etc. They wish they could offload these tasks and focus on main business. Organisations also typically want quick deployment and QA times and do not want to go through the whole process of requirement gathering from teams, discussing with vendors sales team , placing order , server delivery and installation. They want to use IT as a utility.
Given below are common cloud service models:-
IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service , refers to offerings from cloud vendors providing Compute, Network and Storage. It is customer's responsibility to install OS, Database or Apps, Manage security and patching. Customer has full flexibility in this model.
PaaS – Platform as a Service, where cloud vendor provides pre-installed OS images along with Database / Apps, Security Tools etc. Customer installs own software and starts using the instance.
SaaS – Software as a Service, where end product softwares are provided by vendor like E-mail / messaging, Sales Dashboard, Blog Hosting, HR Payroll, Training Module etc. Customer has least flexibility in doing customization under this model.
The certification also introduces you to popular cloud offerings which are listed below:-
Commercial Cloud offerings
Amazon AWS – The market leader in Cloud space, offers IaaS and PaaS services like Amazon EC2, S3, Redshift, Beanstalk.
Google – Provides PaaS as Google App Engine and SaaS in form of Google Apps.
Microsoft Azure – Offers PaaS and IaaS services.
Salesforce – Popular as a SaaS service, provides sales collaborative tool known as The Sales Cloud.
Microsoft Office 365 – Provides MS office and other business productivity tools. It is a SaaS service.
Open source cloud offerings
Cloud Foundry – Developed by and hosted on VMware platform, offers MongoDB , MYSQL etc as PaaS offering.
OpenStack – IaaS project under Apache License, supported by companies like AMD, Brocade, SUSE Linux, Red Hat, Vmware, Yahoo, HP, IBM,Intel, Rackspace, Cisco, EMC among others.
Eucalytus – AWS compatible open source software for building private and public clouds.
Ubuntu One – File Synchronisation and backup platfrom.
The exam also had some scenario based questions on Amazon AWS. There were total 50 questions to be answered in 60 minutes timeframe.
Overall it was a good experience and i strongly recommend this certification for beginners and those who do not have any cloud experience and those who want to learn more about cloud computing. Clearing this exam would give you the confidence to study more on Amazon AWS and will act as a baby step for future accomplishments.
The certification cost is 3000/- INR. You can visit the vskills website at www.vskills.in/certification/
As you might already know, over the last decade virtualization techniques have come of age and commodity hardware has also matured. Customers whose main focus is not IT, feel burdened by IT overhead costs like manpower requirements, Datacenter up keep, power requirements etc. They wish they could offload these tasks and focus on main business. Organisations also typically want quick deployment and QA times and do not want to go through the whole process of requirement gathering from teams, discussing with vendors sales team , placing order , server delivery and installation. They want to use IT as a utility.
Given below are common cloud service models:-
IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service , refers to offerings from cloud vendors providing Compute, Network and Storage. It is customer's responsibility to install OS, Database or Apps, Manage security and patching. Customer has full flexibility in this model.
PaaS – Platform as a Service, where cloud vendor provides pre-installed OS images along with Database / Apps, Security Tools etc. Customer installs own software and starts using the instance.
SaaS – Software as a Service, where end product softwares are provided by vendor like E-mail / messaging, Sales Dashboard, Blog Hosting, HR Payroll, Training Module etc. Customer has least flexibility in doing customization under this model.
The certification also introduces you to popular cloud offerings which are listed below:-
Commercial Cloud offerings
Amazon AWS – The market leader in Cloud space, offers IaaS and PaaS services like Amazon EC2, S3, Redshift, Beanstalk.
Google – Provides PaaS as Google App Engine and SaaS in form of Google Apps.
Microsoft Azure – Offers PaaS and IaaS services.
Salesforce – Popular as a SaaS service, provides sales collaborative tool known as The Sales Cloud.
Microsoft Office 365 – Provides MS office and other business productivity tools. It is a SaaS service.
Open source cloud offerings
Cloud Foundry – Developed by and hosted on VMware platform, offers MongoDB , MYSQL etc as PaaS offering.
OpenStack – IaaS project under Apache License, supported by companies like AMD, Brocade, SUSE Linux, Red Hat, Vmware, Yahoo, HP, IBM,Intel, Rackspace, Cisco, EMC among others.
Eucalytus – AWS compatible open source software for building private and public clouds.
Ubuntu One – File Synchronisation and backup platfrom.
The exam also had some scenario based questions on Amazon AWS. There were total 50 questions to be answered in 60 minutes timeframe.
Overall it was a good experience and i strongly recommend this certification for beginners and those who do not have any cloud experience and those who want to learn more about cloud computing. Clearing this exam would give you the confidence to study more on Amazon AWS and will act as a baby step for future accomplishments.
The certification cost is 3000/- INR. You can visit the vskills website at www.vskills.in/certification/
