It's getting "cloudy" out there

There's this new term out there, you may have heard of it—Cloud. While the word cloud has certainly turned into a buzzword that is often misused and spoken of inappropriately, the idea of cloud infrastructure is an incredibly powerful one. A cloud fabric is one that revolves around virtual resources—virtual machines, virtual disks, and even virtual networks. Being plugged into the cloud typically enables things like the ability to spin up new servers on a whim, or even the ability for particular services themselves to increase or decrease their needed resources automatically, based on utilization. Think of a simple e-commerce website where a consumer can go to order goods. Perhaps 75% of the year they can operate this website on a single web server with limited resources, resulting in a fairly low cost of service. But the other 25% of the year, maybe around the holiday seasons, utilization ramps way up, requiring much more computing power.

Prior to cloud mentality, this would mean that the company would need to have their environment sized to fit the maximum requirements all the time, in case it was ever needed. They would be paying for more servers and much more computing power than was needed for the majority of the year. With a cloud fabric, giving the website the ability to increase or decrease the number of servers it has at its disposal as needed, the total cost of such a website or service can be drastically decreased. This is the major driving factor of cloud in business today.

Private cloud

While most people working in the IT sector these days have a pretty good understanding of what it means to be part of a cloud service, and many are indeed doing so today, a term which is being pushed into enterprises everywhere and is still many times misunderstood is private cloud. At first, I took this to be a silly marketing ploy, a gross misuse of the term cloud to try and appeal to those hooked by buzzwords. Boy was I wrong. In the early days of private clouds, the technology wasn't quite ready to stand up to what was being advertised. Today, however, that story has changed. It is now entirely possible to take the same fabric that is running up in the true, public cloud, and install that fabric right inside your datacenter. This enables you to provide your company with cloud benefits such as the ability to spin resources up and down, and to run everything virtualized, and to implement all of the neat tips and tricks of cloud environments, with all of the serving power and data storage remaining locally owned and secured by you. Trusting cloud storage companies to keep data safe and secure is absolutely one of the biggest blockers to implementation on the true public cloud, but by installing your own private cloud, you get the best of both worlds. Stretchable compute environments with the security of knowing you still control and own all of your own data.

This is not a book about clouds, public or private. I mention this to give a baseline for some of the items we will discuss in later chapters, and also to get your mouth watering a little bit to dig in and do a little reading yourself on cloud technology. You will see the Windows Server 2016 interface in many new ways with the cloud, and will notice that so many of the underlying systems available in Server 2016 are similar if not the same as those becoming available inside Microsoft Azure, which is Microsoft's cloud services platform. In these pages, we will not focus on the capabilities of Azure, but rather a more traditional sense of Windows Server that would be utilized on-premise. With the big push toward cloud technologies, it's easy to get caught with blinders on and think that everything and everyone is quickly running to the cloud for all of their technology needs, but it simply isn't true. Most companies will have the need for many on-premise servers for many years to come; in fact many may never put full trust in the cloud and will forever maintain their own datacenters. These datacenters will have local servers that will require server administrators to manage them. That is where you come in.