Question

Coastal Biotech is a San Diego company that currently leases data center space in a colocation facility in Kearney Mesa and has ten physical servers for its diagnostic test analysis business. The company is experiencing tremendous growth in business due to COVID-19 testing and needs to quickly expand its capacity 10x. Your CIO would like you to create a cloud architecture drawing that highlights the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) services necessary in order to meet the company's growing diagnostic testing needs. You do not need to worry about the actual biological material testing aspects of the company's business, so you should be focusing on the underlying IT infrastructure. The CIO has prepared the following technology requirements to help guide you:

• 2 Terabytes of object storage to start and a plan to scale up and down with business needs
• 2 Virtual Machines for Databases per Region
• Container infrastructure that scales up and down with testing needs
• Container management that is simple enough to be managed with the existing five person IT organization
• Health data needs to be secured
• All credentials need to be centrally managed and secured
• The infrastructure needs to be deployed into two U.S. regions for business continuity purposes

My question is what does the cloud architecture drawing look like that highlights the Infastructure as a Service (IaaS) in order to meet the company's growing diagnostic testing needs? I've had a lot of trouble understanding this concept so your help will be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is a form of cloud computing that supplies virtualized computing resources over the internet. IaaS is one of the three main classifications of cloud computing services, next software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS).

Working of IaaS:

In an IaaS model, a cloud provider hosts the infrastructure components generally present in an on-premises data center, including servers, storage and networking hardware, also the virtualization or hypervisor layer.

The IaaS provider also supplies a range of services to go along with those infrastructure components. These can include complete billing, monitoring, log access, security, load balancing and clustering, as well as storage flexibility, such as backup, replication and recovery. These services are growingly policy-driven, allowing IaaS users to implement greater levels of automation and orchestration for important infrastructure tasks. For example, a user can execute policies to operate load balancing to maintain application availability and performance.

IaaS customers acquire resources and services by a wide area network (WAN), such as the internet, and can utilize the cloud provider's services to install the remaining elements of an application stack. For example, the user can register in to the IaaS platform to create virtual machines (VMs) install operating systems in each VirtualMachine; deploy middleware, such as databases; create storage buckets for workloads and backups, and install the enterprise workload into that Virtual Machine. Customers can then use the provider's services to follow costs, monitor performance, balance network traffic, troubleshoot application issues, manage disaster recovery and more.

Cloud architecture:

Other than having an established backup strategy, to guarantee business continuity, ensure your system is prepared for reboots and relaunches. Automation in your deployment practice is essential, with recipes for server configuration and deployment. Providing automation need new development practices such as development and operations management, continuous integration, test-driven development, and so on.

Advantages of this structure:

1. High availability
2. Performance
3. Security
4. Monitoring