Public Cloud Architecture

Abstract

Cloud technology is one of the greatest recent innovation enablers, not just accessible to large enterprises who have traditionally had the funds to build large datacenters. Cloud technology is available to anyone who has a little bit of know-how and offers virtual machines, or commonly called instances, that have networking speeds from the megabits per second up to 100s of gigabits per second.

Underneath the great innovation that is cloud, the glue that has made cloud technology possible is the network. Ethernet, Internet Protocol (IP), Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), and User Datagram Protocol (UDP), all other networking protocols that have been around for decades, are all still alive and well within the cloud. The only difference between building datacenters on-premises yesterday and building virtual datacenters in the cloud today, outside of the ease of use and programmable interfaces, is layers. Considering the Open Systems Interconnect (OSI) model, cloud networking is no different, just with more depth and additional layers to consider, not layers of the OSI model, but rather layers of infrastructure management as well as abstraction of the user space from the infrastructure itself.