Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1113313
TECHNOLOGY 14 | SUNDAY • 5 MAY 2019 maltatoday THE Maltese Government, through MITA, has recently procured a Hybrid Cloud Platform via an open tender, the largest single investment made by MI- TA of approximately €15 million over seven years. The winning bid was based on Micro- soft's Azure Hybrid Cloud architecture. The solution is mainly built using Microsoft's public Azure cloud and Microsoft's Azure stack – a localised extension of Microsoft's Public Azure Cloud. Through the Hybrid Cloud Platform Government shall be able to consist- ently run applications from both with- in MITA's datacentres (on-premises) and Microsoft's Public Cloud which is located at Microsoft's datacentres (off- premises). What is cloud computing? In simple terms, Cloud Computing provides computing as a service instead of as a product. It brings about a transformational shift from buying your own hardware and software and building your own data-centre to using a certified tried and tested architecture, built and man- aged by someone else, such as Micro- soft, Amazon or Google. All resources within the cloud are billed on a pay-per-use basis, allowing tenants (users) to only pay for resourc- es they make use of. In our case, we have also included in this solution a central billing portal that will allow Government Ministries and Entities to monitor the cost of their re- sources. Microsoft's Azure Cloud offerings are based on three "packages"; Infrastruc- ture as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Ser- vice (SaaS). To explain this better, I am going to compare each to a pizza service. In the traditional data-centre, one would have to buy all the items to make, cook and eat the pizza; such as table, chairs, oven, electricity, dough and toppings. With IaaS, the main pizza compo- nents (dough and toppings) are pro- vided by someone else and you need to provide the table, chairs and the oven to cook it, just like when buying a frozen pizza from a supermarket. With PaaS, the dough, and toppings are provided by someone else who will also cook the pizza and deliver it to you. Hence, all you need to provide are the table and chairs. Lastly, with SaaS, everything is pro- vided by someone else, which, in our example, is like dining out at a restau- rant, whereby the table and chairs, ov- en, electricity, dough and toppings are all provided. From this example, one quickly real- ises that cloud computing offers great flexibility. Moreover, Government organisations can focus on their core competencies and business while supported by infra- structures designed and managed by certified professionals and companies such as Microsoft. Two cornerstones of any cloud of- fering are self-service and automa- tion. This enables developers to build systems faster as they are in control of provisioning the resources they re- quire. Furthermore, they can automate de- ployments by utilising Infrastructure as Code. This means that systems can be deployed time and time again with minimal to no intervention. This results in greater resource effi- ciency, higher security, lower costs and shorter time to deploy services. What is a hybrid cloud? There are three types of cloud com- puting; public, private and hybrid cloud. While they share the same cloud fundamentals their defining proposi- tion is their location. A public cloud is located at the ser- vice provider's premises, such as data- centres owned by Microsoft, Amazon or Google. It is shared between tenants, with each tenant having their own fully iso- lated environment. The benefit of a public cloud is that whoever uses it, has zero upfront in- vestment to make since all the hard- ware, power and cooling is taken care of by whoever is hosting the public cloud. A private cloud is located at the cus- tomer's datacentre, in Government's case, MITA's datacentres. The private cloud can be compared to a domestic appliance, such as a fridge. One does not need to know the engi- neering behind it and how it was built. All one needs to do is provide the power and it will do the rest. Simi- larly, the private cloud on-premises is a closed box designed and supported by the service provider e.g. Microsoft. MITA provides the power, cooling and connectivity to it. The private cloud deployed for Gov- ernment is within the control of MITA, and while it is shared by Government organisations, it will not be shared with other non-Government tenants. A hybrid cloud is a public cloud and a private cloud connected to each other. They remain separate cloud entities but use the same underlying technology. What are the added benefits of a hybrid cloud? By having the Azure Stack on- premises, Government within its own (MITA's) data-centres has the same technology that powers Azure within Microsoft's data centres. This offers an integrated delivery experience for its clients. Government, now, has the flexibility to choose the right combination of off- premises and on-premises deployment models to meet the business and tech- nical requirements for its solutions. For instance, applications that run on-premises can move off-premises and vice versa without requiring major re-design. System developers will have at their disposal tools that are only available within the cloud which go much be- yond the traditional virtualisation tech- nology. For instance, Government systems can make use of Virtual Machine Scale Sets on-premise that enable rapid de- ployments with automatic scaling op- tions for modern workloads. This means, that if a service is un- der heavy usage, the cloud platform will automatically add more resources Hybrid cloud and the government Roderick Stone