Cloud technology has gradually permeated not only IT operations but also business models over the last decade and a half. It has progressed from a “disruptive” to a “basic” or “staple” technology.
“Cloud adoption will continue to accelerate as we require important workloads to support distant workers and manage data center operations,” states Ed Anderson, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner, during the Gartner IT Symposium 2020. The phrase, “workload,” is full of promise – and perils. A workload in computing was originally any software that runs on a computer or the work performed by it. However, in a society increasingly powered by technology, it has taken on new meaning.
It is, at its foundation, a computer system’s ability and method of processing input and producing output. Viewing and altering photographs on a laptop necessitates computer processing software instructions. That is a lot of labor. When someone searches for something on Google, a data center processes a workload resulting in a list of links on the screen. Workloads are simply “putting things together to gather data, figuring out what something means, or constructing anything,” according to Judith Hurwitz, president, and CEO of Hurwitz & Associates and author of Cloud Computing for Dummies. “It’s crucial to computer science.”
What Are Cloud Workloads?
A cloud workload is an application, service, capability, or amount of work that utilizes cloud-based resources (such as computing or memory power). A Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP) is made to offer security that specifically tailors itself to the needs of workloads present in public, private, or hybrid cloud environments. Workloads have particular security requirements that differ from traditional IT systems. Databases, containers, microservices, virtual machines, and Hadoop nodes are all cloud workloads.
The best thing about cloud workloads is that with each deployment, a new version comes into existence. Cloud workloads come in a variety of shapes and sizes. What matters is what they do and what they allow organizations to do.
Which Workloads Work Best in the Cloud?
The number of cloud workload is increasing as more parts of the business and daily life are going digital with the help of the advent of cloud computing. A cloud workload may consist of anything from an oil rig infrastructure examining field samples to a transactional database that handles order management for an enterprise.
Gartner suggests that enterprises consider transferring these critical workloads to the public cloud as soon as possible:
Mobility: Mobile devices and software make remote work easy. The adaptable cloud approach is an excellent choice for mobile solutions.
Collaboration and content management: Imagine working today without Microsoft Office 365 or Google Workspace. It demonstrates the cloud’s usefulness for office productivity apps.
Videoconferencing: As a result of the pandemic, videoconferencing has become a critical operational role. Given the varying networking bandwidth needs, hyper-scale cloud providers can reliably supply video conferencing solutions.
Virtual desktops and remote workstation management: Enabling remote work requires a dependable virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). Cloud-based virtualization and DaaS are already commonplace, offering a scalable and secure alternative to traditional data center-based solutions.
Disaster Recovery: Cloud-based disaster recovery is both cost-effective and secure. It also saves businesses the cost and hassle of maintaining redundant production-quality infrastructure in a different location. Databases, analytics, and web/content hosting are currently the most prevalent workloads across public, private, and hybrid clouds. Cloud infrastructure or services that manage computing, storage, and networking effectively and efficiently are crucial for businesses and organizations that rely more on data and technology.
The difficulty comes from managing these different cloud services as a whole. A unified hybrid and multi-cloud architecture may include multiple workloads that run on a mix of public cloud and on-premise infrastructures. It is where businesses should search for vendors who provide a comprehensive cloud management plan that includes storage, computing, and networking.
Types of Workloads in the Cloud
To determine whether workloads suit private, public, or hybrid cloud environments, we must classify them according to their design, resource requirements, and usage patterns.
Cloud workloads are classified according to their resource requirements as follows:
General Compute: Workloads with no special computing requirements that often execute on the cloud’s default setup. Common web apps, web servers, distributed data stores, and containerized microservices are examples of these.
CPU-Intensive: Workloads with high computing requirements and a large number of concurrent users are considered CPU-intensive.These include massively multiplayer online games and deep learning applications that require processor-intensive operations such as video encoding, big data analytics, 3D modeling, and so on.
Memory-Intensive: Workloads require large amounts of memory and processing power to process millions of transactions per second. Real-time streaming data, caches, and diverse databases are examples of these.
GPU-Accelerated Computing: Some workloads have extremely high processing requirements, such as voice recognition, self-driving automobiles, navigation systems, computational fluid dynamics, seismic analysis, and so on. To do real-time operations, these require the power of GPUs and CPUs.
Storage Optimized: Workloads such as in-memory databases, highly scalable NoSQL databases, and data warehouses benefit from efficient storage.
Other Important Workloads
Workloads based on their availability and traffic are more crucial. You can use the following usage patterns to categorize cloud workloads:
Static Workloads: Have well-defined resource needs, demand, and uptime. CRM, ERP, and email are examples of core enterprise services.
Seasonal Workloads: These are subject to traffic spikes at specified periods of the day, week, month, or year. Bill payment or tax and accounting software are two examples. Serverless computing, in which customers are not accountable for optimal instances, is excellent for certain tasks.
Unforeseen Workloads: Popular apps and platforms such as social networks, online multiplayer games, video streaming sites, and so on can see their traffic rapidly rise in a matter of seconds. Cloud auto-scaling capabilities may handle such spikes by dynamically adding instances as needed.
Weighing the Benefits and Drawbacks of Running Workloads in the Cloud
According to McDowell, the cloud is highly appealing for initiatives that need to be spun up fast or have a short life cycle. “Moving them to the cloud gives you more flexibility,” he says. “With the push of a button, you can deploy infrastructures such as storage, computing, or networking.” The cost of public cloud services is based on usage rather than capital investment.”
Cloud environments have the benefit of being extensively distributed, in addition to scalability. It boosts the workload’s efficiency. In actuality, portability and abstraction of the underlying architecture are presumptions made when a service is referred to as a workload. The majority of cloud workloads may transfer data without causing any issues between multiple cloud platforms, from on-prem to the cloud, or vice versa, thanks to containerization.
But not all workloads are appropriate for the cloud. The need for some data to stay in particular regions of the world might affect cloud-based workloads due to data and privacy restrictions, performance challenges, and other factors.
Although moving to the cloud can be surprisingly inexpensive, there may not be any long-term benefits. Enterprises frequently experience problems because they fail to conduct an upfront study. They wind up moving workloads from public clouds back to hosted on-premises environments, HCI, or data centers.
Therefore, it’s crucial to evaluate the compatibility of workloads across various cloud models, on-premise applications, and data centers.
Workload as a Service
Workloads are constantly changing. They also alter in terms of how they are deployed and how they use services. IT professionals no longer manually layer servers, storage, and software together for each workload. Today, intelligent software may help with infrastructure provisioning and workload adaptation.
According to Poitras, we can now use vendor-delivered services like CRM or ITSM. The service in this instant remains unchanged, but the location of the workload changes. IT teams find it easier to use and manage these services because of cloud computing’s workload-as-a-Service model.
