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Deployment models or methods in cloud technology refers to where the infrastructure or servers that empowers the cloud technology are housed, who is in charge of the maintenance and management of the infrastructures, who can be considered as the owner and the method in which the cloud is made accessible to the users or consumers. There are 3 main cloud deployment models which are Public Cloud, Private Cloud and Hybrid Cloud. Let's go over each of them and their use case so as to know which deployment best suits your application
- Public Cloud A public cloud as the name suggests is a cloud deployment model that is available to the general public to use over the internet. The service providers allow access to servers, storage and secure networks. This service providers make use of APIs [Application Programming Interfaces] and web consoles to give customers access to their servers, infrastructures, and some application services such as text-to-speech application, image description application etc. The cloud service provider is in charge of maintaining and managing the infrastructure while all the customer or user has to do is pay a fee for the resources their application uses. It does have it upside and downside because users don't get to bear the cost of acquiring and assembling the servers and also the maintenance cost of those servers and infrastructures which offers significant cost savings while also allowing flexibility but it has it downside in the sense that should the service provider go down or have a security breach your application gets affected. Some of the popular public clouds include AWS [Amazon Web Service], Microsoft Azure, GCP [Google Cloud Platform], IBM Cloud etc.
Private Cloud A private cloud could be described as a cloud deployment model in which the organization owns, manages and maintains the cloud infrastructure with the consumers being business units within the organization. This is mostly used for large and somewhat older older organizations as it was mostly the older ways till. about 2006 when the first public cloud was created. This is a very expensive and capital intensive methods as it involves purchasing the physical server infrastructure, powering and maintaining them while also paying for powering and cooling costs. It does have its upside as it allows for better security measures to be put in place while also allowing for a better application portability should the need arise.
Hybrid Cloud A hybrid cloud is a cloud deployment model that allows for an organization to combine the powers of the private and public clouds into a single cloud infrastructure model that allows for flexibility to choose which application or workload gets which cloud resource allowing for the easy movement of workloads between the clouds as the need arises. Hybrid cloud offers significant benefits in security and compliance, scalability and resilience, resource optimization, and cost saving. Hybrid cloud allows for organizations. to run highly sensitive workload on the private cloud while also leveraging the cost effective public cloud during peak workloads. There are 2 types of hybrid cloud the Hybrid Monocloud which is a hybrid cloud with only one public cloud provider while a Hybrid Multicloud is a hybrid cloud which makes use of two or more public cloud providers as the need arises therefore enjoying the different benefits of the various public cloud providers.
To conclude there are 3 main cloud deployment models and the nature, requirements and workload of your application play a role in determining which deployment model to use while also taking into consideration the capital expenditure required for the different models as the cost differ.