Cloud Computing Fundamentals: Infrastructure and Datacenters

Discover data center hardware, including servers, storage, networking, power, and cooling, and learn access rules and safety. Compare Ethernet and fiber optic cabling by speed, distance, and cost.

Establish power redundancy with two power supply units and two PDUs per rack to ensure seamless operation when one unit fails. Monitor environmental specifications and power consumption to prevent outages.

Learn how data center racks organize hardware appliances by rack units, from 1u to 7u in 19-inch frames, including blade servers mounted in chassis to save space.

Learn how small form factor pluggable transceivers enable copper or fiber connections between network devices, are hot-pluggable, protect the fiber, and convert light signals to electrical signals.

Conduct a site survey to evaluate a data center's cooling reliability, power availability and redundancy, cabling requirements, and rack space, then document hardware needs like cables and heat generation.

Explore cloud computing concepts, including private, public, and hybrid clouds, their service models, deployment, cost, scalability, and how on‑prem infrastructure integrates with cloud services.

Explore cloud service models—infrastructure, platform, and software as a service—and how private, public, and hybrid clouds host them with provider and customer responsibilities.

Provide networking, file, and virtualization services via Windows Server. Enable a domain, a human-friendly website name, and introduce DNS mapping in the next video.

Explore how a domain controller in Windows Server authenticates and authorizes users and devices, enforces security policies, and manages Active Directory objects, including security principals, groups, and resources.

Show how the domain name system translates human-friendly domain names into IP addresses and back, letting browsers fetch websites in the background.

Network time protocol (ntp) synchronizes clocks across devices on a network, using either local ntp servers or public ntp servers such as time.google.com or the NTP pool project.

Discover how the dynamic host configuration protocol (dhcp) server acts as an automated receptionist, assigning ip addresses and network settings from a defined pool to devices.

Discover how servers leverage high-spec hardware, virtualization, and out-of-band management to deliver scalable infrastructure, covering CPUs, memory, RAID, firmware, and remote monitoring.

Explore virtualization and hypervisors, including type one and type two, with VMware ESXi and Hyper-V, and tools like vCenter Server and System Center Virtual Machine Manager for data center consolidation.

Achieve high availability in virtualization by using cluster management, shared storage, and load balancing to keep virtual machines running when a physical host fails.

Move virtual machines across a cluster to balance memory and CPU usage and prevent downtime during maintenance or upgrade; learn cold migration and hot or live migration with shared storage.

Capture the VM's RAM, virtual disks, and configuration with snapshots to enable quick testing and rollback; the delta disks record changes, enabling revert or consolidation, not a backup.

Explore the two virtualization provider types—software providers and cloud providers—and discover key players like VMware, Hyper-V, Oracle VirtualBox, and infrastructure as a service offerings from Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud.

Explain how to verify hardware compatibility with software using vendor compatibility matrices, ensuring servers meet hardware requirements and support the latest VMware ESXi, Red Hat, and Microsoft OS.

Explore how top-of-rack, core, and management switches enable data center communication, with top-of-rack switches connecting devices, core switches handling heavy traffic, and out-of-band management via a dedicated management switch.

Compare tcp/ip and udp as transport layer protocols, highlighting tcp's reliable in-order delivery and ip routing, and udp's fast, unordered delivery; note ethernet speeds from 1g to 100g.

Discover how IP addresses function as digital identifiers for devices, including IPv4 and IPv6, enabling communication across the internet. Explore subnetting and gateway roles to organize networks and direct traffic.

Discover how network protocols, HTTPS, SMTP, FTP, DNS, and TCP/IP, serve as a common language for devices to transfer data between servers and switches, defining formatting, error detection, and encryption.

VLANs segment a shared network into isolated departmental networks using VLAN IDs and IP ranges for improved security. Access mode uses a single VLAN per port; trunk mode carries VLANs.

Learn how to prevent downtime with switch redundancy by connecting a server to two switches in a VPC or stacking configuration, using dual uplinks and port numbering to identify connections.

Secure cloud infrastructure with security technologies, practices, and measures to protect services and data from hackers. Explore three methods—firewalls, DMZ, and virtual private networks—to bolster protection.

Firewalls act as data center security devices, monitoring traffic and blocking malicious or unauthorized access. They enforce access control rules to protect sensitive data from hackers and ransomware.

Explore how a demilitarized zone (DMZ) provides an extra layer of security by isolating internal networks from the public internet and placing public services in front of the firewall.

Understand how a virtual private network creates a secure tunnel, encrypting data to protect online activity and hide your IP on public networks.

Explore storage appliances as specialized hardware delivering networked storage services with pre-configured software for provisioning, monitoring, and server integration, including deduplication, encryption, compression, and raid protection.

Compare direct attached storage, network attached storage, and storage area networks, including SATA, SAS, and USB interfaces, to understand their latency, scalability, and file-level and block-level access.

Compare file level storage with directories and metadata to block level storage with fixed-size blocks; use file level for documents and sharing, and block level for databases and virtual machines.

The lecture compares HDDs, SSDs, and NVMe drives, detailing how each stores data and differs in performance, durability, and typical use cases.

Explore raid, a storage technology that stripes data across multiple disks with parity for redundancy, offering levels 0, 1, 5, 6, and 10 with varying performance and capacity trade-offs.

Learn how logical unit numbers (luns) serve as unique identifiers in SAN and storage infrastructure, map storage pools to servers as block-level devices, and support resizing, reallocation, and access control.

Explore SAN switches and zoning in storage area networks, enabling you to connect many servers to shared storage and isolate access to data stores for security and performance.

Explore shared storage as the storage infrastructure that lets multiple servers access the same pool of storage resources, enabling seamless vmotion and uninterrupted virtual machine workloads. Learn how redundancy and high availability, data replication, and RAID preserve data integrity, while scalable storage supports centralized data management in enterprise data centers.

Learn how backups create data copies to guard against loss, corruption, and hardware failures. Discover replication for redundancy and availability with real-time copies across locations, minimizing downtime.

Compare three backup types—full, incremental, and differential—covering data retention and backup schedule. Incremental restores require all increments after the full, while differential restores need only the last full and differential.

Explore file-level and image-level backup technologies, and decide when to back up specific folders versus complete system images. Understand storage implications and recovery time with incremental, full, and differential backups.

Explore data retention, deciding how long backups are kept to meet data protection and regulatory needs. Create a backup policy to define what, how often, and where to store backups.

Data deduplication removes duplicate data blocks by keeping a single copy and linking references, while compression reduces storage with pattern-based encoding; using both minimizes backup storage.

Data restoration retrieves data from backups to recover from deletion, corruption, hardware failures, and security incidents, while supporting disaster recovery, data migration, and regular backup testing.

Summarizes key concepts in data center hardware, cloud services, domain and DNS, virtualization with high availability and VM migration, storage sizing, networking, security, and backup types.