Cloud Deployment Models

19th August 2020

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What are the most popular cloud deployment models? There are four types of them: public, private, hybrid and community clouds. Additionally, there are also distributed clouds, multiclouds, poly clouds and other models, but they are not so widespread.

Public Cloud

The name speaks for itself: public clouds are available to the general public, and data are created and stored on third-party servers.

Server infrastructure belongs to service providers that manage them and administer pool resources, which is why there is no need for user companies to buy and maintain their hardware. Provider companies offer resources as a service both free of charge or on a pay-per-use basis via the Internet connection. Users can scale resources when required.

The public cloud deployment model is the first choice for businesses that operate within the industries with low privacy concerns. When it comes to popular public cloud deployment models, examples are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) — the top service provider, Microsoft Azure, Google App Engine, IBM Cloud, Salesforce Heroku and others.

The Advantages of a Public Cloud

High scalability
Reduced Cost
24/7 uptime

The Disadvantages of a Public Cloud

Compromised Reliability
Data security and privacy give rise to concern
The lack of a bespoke service

Private Cloud

There is little to no difference between a public and a private model from the technical point of view, as their architectures are very similar. However, opposed to a public cloud that is available to the general public, only one specific company owns a private one. That is why it is also called an internal or corporate.

Only one organization uses this deployment model to run its workloads, and the server can be hosted externally or on the premises of the user company. Regardless of their physical location, these infrastructures are maintained on a designated private network and use software and hardware that are intended for a specific company.

A clearly defined scope of persons have access to the information kept in a private repository, which prevents the general public from using it. In light of numerous breaches, a growing number of large corporations decided on a closed private type as it is expected to be less risky.

Multiple public cloud service providers — including Amazon, IBM, Cisco, Dell and Red Hat — also provide private solutions along with public ones.

The Advantages of a Private Cloud

Bespoke and flexible development and high scalability, which allows companies to customize their infrastructures in accordance with their requirements
High security, privacy and reliability as only authorized persons can access resources

The Disadvantages of a Private Cloud

The major disadvantage of the private cloud deployment model is its cost, as it requires considerable expenses on hardware, software and staff training. That is why this secure and flexible computing deployment model is not a choice for small companies.

Community Cloud

A community deployment model largely resembles a private one; the only difference is the set of users. While a private type implies that only one company owns the server, in the case of a community one, several organizations with similar backgrounds share the infrastructure and related resources.

If the organizations have uniform security, privacy and performance requirements, this multi-tenant data center architecture helps companies achieve their business-specific objectives. That is why a community model is particularly suited for organizations that work on joint projects. In that case, a centralized cloud facilitates project development, management and implementation. Also, the costs are shared across all users.

The Advantages of a Community Cloud

Cost reduction
Improved security, privacy and reliability
Ease of data sharing and collaboration

The Disadvantages of a Community Cloud

High cost if compared to a public deployment model
Sharing of fixed storage and bandwidth capacity
It is not widespread so far

Hybrid Cloud

As it is usually the case with any hybrid phenomenon, a hybrid cloud encompasses the best features of the above-mentioned deployment models — public, private and community ones. It allows companies to mix and match the facets of all three types that best suit their requirements.

As an example, a company can balance its load by locating mission-critical workloads on a secure private cloud and deploying less sensitive ones to a public one. Hybrid cloud deployment model not only safeguards and controls strategically important assets but does so in the most cost- and resource-effective way possible for each specific case. Also, this approach facilitates data and application portability.