Understanding the Architecture of a Cloud Ecosystem

In order to understand the architecture of a cloud system, it is essential to understand how individual technologies are integrated to create clouds, that is, IT environments that are abstract, pool and share scalable resources across networks. It invariably refers to how all the components and capabilities necessary to build a cloud are all connected in order to deliver an online platform on which applications can run without any hassle.

To make it simpler, let’s imagine you are building a house: Here, the cloud infrastructure incorporates all the materials, while cloud architecture is the basic blueprint.

The structure of a cloud
Considering that a cloud provider supplies users with both the platform and the underlying IT infrastructure, clouds are referred to as Platforms-as-a-Service. In order to architect a cloud platform, it requires more than just simply abstracting a computer’s capabilities from its hardware components; and this is precisely how providers create and offer cloud infrastructure to users.

Data pipeline
Besides, it also has other requirements of additional levels of development in order to incorporate containerization, orchestration, routing, security, management, application programming interfaces as well as automation software. The user experience design, that is the UX, is also essential while creating a navigable online experience. Additionally, while a data pipeline generates real-time insights, it can either be a storm or spark pipeline, depending upon which streaming processing engine you choose in order to build your application.

Other basic requirements
Although there are a variety of cloud architectures based on what you’re trying to achieve, most clouds typically require middleware, hardware, management along with a sufficient amount of automation software. Most clouds make use of virtualization in order to abstract the hardware resources into central managed data lakes, while some clouds, specifically known as bare-metal clouds, connect the hardware directly to the clients.

StreamAnalytix Cloud: A Practical example
Here’s a practical example: StreamAnalytix by Impetus Technologies is a popular enterprise grade, visual, big data analytics platform solely aimed at unifying streaming and batch data processing based on best-of-breed open source technologies. It also supports the end-to-end functionality of data ingestion and enrichment, machine learning, action triggers as well as visualization. StreamAnalytix also offers an intuitive drag-and-drop visual interface that helps to build, operationalize as well as manage big data applications at least five to ten times faster, across industries, data formats and use cases.

StreamAnalytix also provides a powerful visual tool-kit for developing real-time streaming analytics applications with minimal coding, along with a data pipeline, which is a structured flow of data, which collects, processes, and analyzes high-volume data to generate real-time insights. All of this, put together, is representative of a basic cloud architecture.