Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Components

In previous sections of this book, you explored the main pillars of cloud computing: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). Each model represents a layer in the cloud computing stack, offering various levels of abstraction and control to meet diverse business and technological needs. The full potential and operational excellence of these models are fundamentally anchored in the underlying cloud infrastructure and platform components. Most of these components are physically located with the CSP, but many are accessible via the network.

Cloud infrastructure is the collection of hardware and software resources that make up the cloud. These components include the physical environment, storage, computing, networking, management, and virtualization. Let’s look at these components and learn how they function. In the shared responsibility model, the customer and CSP share security...