Cloud Deployment Models

Cloud Deployment Models moves from what the cloud is to how organizations actually build with it. The previous topic established the 5 characteristics every cloud service has to clear. This topic asks a different question: whose hardware delivers those characteristics, and who else is allowed to share it. The answer shapes cost, control, and compliance in ways that follow a company through every later decision about services and security.

What This Topic Covers

• the NIST-defined public, private, and community cloud deployment models, and what distinguishes ownership and access in each
• the boundary between a genuine private cloud and a virtualized on-premises environment that only looks like one
• hybrid cloud: connecting private or on-premises infrastructure to a public cloud through tools like AWS Outposts and Azure Arc
• multi-cloud: spreading workloads across 2 or more separate public providers, most often to avoid vendor lock-in
• how to read a scenario and identify which model, or combination of models, it describes

Why It Matters

Every later domain in this course assumes you can already tell these models apart. Security and compliance decisions later in the course depend on knowing whether an organization controls its own hardware or shares a provider's pool. Cost decisions depend on knowing whether an organization pays for dedicated infrastructure or metered public capacity.

Deployment models also show up constantly outside this course, because real organizations rarely fit one label cleanly. A hospital keeping patient records on-premises while running other services on 2 different public clouds is not a hypothetical; it is closer to the default. Once you can separate the hybrid question, is something connected to a private environment, from the multi-cloud question, is more than one public provider involved, you can read a real architecture instead of a marketing label.