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Cloud Deployment Models Explained – CompTIA A+ 220-1201 (Objective 4.2)

Vlad Catrinescu — Thu, 29 May 2025 12:00:00 GMT

Public, private, hybrid, and community—do you know the difference between these cloud deployment models? This video covers exactly what you need to know for the CompTIA A+ (220-1201) exam, explaining each model clearly, along with practical examples and scenarios you’ll encounter as an IT professional.

🎓 From the course: Virtualization and Cloud Computing for CompTIA A+ Core 1 (220-1201)

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Video Summary

Public vs. Private Cloud: The public cloud is the most common deployment model, where multiple clients share the same infrastructure provided by a cloud vendor. Meanwhile, the private cloud is used exclusively by one organization, often with ownership of the hardware and data center.

Hybrid Cloud Magic: This model combines both public and private clouds with automation and orchestration, allowing businesses to enjoy the best of both worlds.

Community Cloud for Shared Needs: Governments and organizations with common regulatory requirements sometimes use a community cloud—shared infrastructure designed to meet specific security, compliance, and jurisdictional needs.

Cloud Tenants Explained: In cloud computing, each client has their own tenant—essentially their space in a provider’s cloud. Most companies have just one, but mergers and acquisitions can lead to multiple tenants and the need for tenant migrations.

Government and Regional Cloud Solutions: Tech giants like Microsoft, AWS, and Google offer special cloud services tailored for government compliance (e.g., Microsoft 365 GCC for FedRAMP) or specific regions (e.g., Azure China and AWS China). These services ensure that data remains within the designated country.

For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!

Transcript

With the types of cloud computing services covered, let’s learn about the different cloud deployment models. There are multiple types of cloud computing models out there. The first one, and probably the most popular, is the public cloud, where you have a cloud vendor that provides cloud services to multiple clients; all the clients securely share the same hardware in the back end. A private cloud, on the other hand, is when the hardware is used exclusively by a single company, which most of the time (but not necessarily always) owns the hardware and data center. This is very close to the traditional data center model that we have always used, but in a private cloud, the organization managing the data center typically builds the different departments for the services that they use.

Next up, we have the hybrid cloud, which is a combination of both a public and a private cloud with automation and orchestration between the two. The last option is the community cloud, which is a shared infrastructure between several organizations with common security, compliance, and jurisdiction concerns. We often see an example of the community cloud when governments from different countries set up a shared services division that hosts all of their IT for that government.

Let’s dive deeper into each one of them. First, most cloud offerings are provided through the public cloud, so unless it’s otherwise specified, the public cloud is the default. Inside the public cloud, each client has its own tenant—that is, the dedicated space in the cloud provider that holds all your services and data. Most organizations have only one tenant, but some might have multiple tenants, especially after a merger or an acquisition, for example. You will often encounter the term “tenant” throughout your career in cloud computing, along with terms like tenant-to-tenant migration, meaning the process of moving from one cloud tenant to another.

Now, for private and hybrid clouds, cloud providers are offering services that allow organizations to manage their private cloud using the same tools, experiences, and app models as those found in on-premises or hybrid data centers. Some industry examples include the Azure Stack and AWS Outposts. Another big advantage is that by using the same technology as in the public cloud but on premises, it becomes much easier to transfer workloads to the public cloud in the future if you decide to do so.

Lastly, probably the most popular type of community cloud is for government use. Microsoft, AWS, and Google all offer specific versions of their tools, such as Microsoft 365 GCC or GCC High, that can handle data subject to specific government regulations or requirements, such as FedRAMP and DoD CGIS, among others. Another example of a community cloud is an offering tailored to a certain country. For example, Microsoft offers Azure China, AWS has AWS China, and there are many more examples like this. These cloud services are deployed in that country and are often separated from the rest of the vendor’s global cloud infrastructure. This setup ensures that the data resides only in that specific country, and while you might see them advertised as sovereign clouds, they are technically community clouds based on our cloud deployment model.

LIMITED TIME! Get CERTIFIED in Microsoft Fabric for FREE!

Vlad Catrinescu — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 13:00:00 GMT

Want to get Microsoft Fabric Certified for FREE? Check out this video to learn how you can get a free DP-600 voucher for the Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate certification!

Learn More

Video Summary

Free DP-600 certification vouchers are available from Microsoft for a limited time.
To qualify, you must join the Microsoft Fabric Community and complete the Ignite Edition Challenge.
Request your voucher by December 10th and take the exam by December 31st, 2024.
Complete all modules in the Ignite Edition Challenge before requesting your voucher.
The challenge is estimated to take around 12 hours, but it might take less time depending on your pace.

For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!

Video Transcript

If one of your goals this year was to get Fabric certified, you’re in luck because, for a limited time, you can get a free DP-600 Microsoft Fabric Analytics Engineer certification voucher. This is a limited-time offer with limited quantities available, so listen to this video to find out how you can get the voucher. Microsoft recently posted an opportunity on the Fabric Community, giving away 5,000 vouchers for the DP-600 certification exam. However, you only have just a bit more than a week to submit your request.

First, you need to be a member of the Microsoft Fabric Community, which is free to register and only takes a few seconds. Then, you must complete the Microsoft Fabric Ignite Edition Challenge. This might take a bit longer but don’t worry because all you have to do is study for the exam, which you should be doing anyway.

After studying for the exam, you can get a free voucher. You need to request your free voucher before December 10th and register for and take the exam before December 31st, 2024.

To get the voucher, join the Fabric Community if you haven’t already. You must not already be a Microsoft Certified Fabric Engineer Associate. Then, register and complete all the modules in the Microsoft Learn Challenge Ignite Edition Fabric Challenge. Join the challenge and complete all the modules, ensuring they show 100% completed before requesting the voucher.

After finishing the challenge, request a free exam voucher by submitting your country and location, Microsoft Learn username, and optionally, why you want to earn the certification. Confirm that you completed all the steps, don’t have the exam yet, can take it before December 31st, 2024, and agree to the terms and conditions. Then, request your free exam voucher.

The Learn Challenge is estimated to take around 12 hours, but it might take less time depending on whether you do the exercises hands-on or just read through the material. Most people will finish it faster. This quick video shares the news and the question is, are you going to try to do the DP-600 Microsoft certification exam before the end of the year?

If yes, get your free voucher because why pay for it when you can have it for free? It has a value of $65 USD, so it’s a cool giveaway. If you found this video valuable and used the offer, make sure to like the video and subscribe to the channel for the latest Microsoft credentials news. Thank you for watching.

Claude AI for IT Professionals: Using Claude AI to Work With Scripts

Vlad Catrinescu — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 12:29:00 GMT

Are you an IT Professional wondering how you can use generative AI tools to become more productive? In this clip from my Anthropic: Prompt Engineering for IT Administrators course on Pluralsight you will see how you can use Claude AI to work with Scripts!

Full Anthropic: Prompt Engineering for IT Administrators

Video Summary

Here are the key points from the video:

Introduction to Claude: The speaker logs into a free Claude account and explains that the course will use this free account for all activities, ensuring no payment is needed.
Explaining PowerShell Scripts: Claude can analyze and explain existing PowerShell scripts, detailing what each part does and providing a summary of the script’s function, which is helpful for IT administrators who inherit scripts they don’t fully understand.
Creating Scripts with Claude: Claude can also generate new scripts based on user specifications. For example, it can create a PowerShell script to add a new user to Azure AD, including all necessary modules and commands.
Asking Questions About Scripting: Users can ask Claude questions about scripting, such as which languages can be used to create a virtual machine in AWS. Claude provides relevant examples and explanations based on the context of the conversation.
Troubleshooting Scripts: Claude can help troubleshoot errors in scripts by identifying issues and suggesting corrections. For instance, it can point out syntax errors and provide the corrected version of a PowerShell script.

For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!

Video Transcript

With the introduction done, let’s head over to the lab and start using Claude to be more productive. In this first demo, we will learn how to use Claude to work with scripts. I’m now in the lab environment. Let me open up the browser over here, where I simply went to Claude.ai and logged into a free account because everything that we will do in this course will be with a free account, so there is no payment needed for you to do everything that I’m doing in this course.

Now, how can Claude help? Let me first go through my first scenario here, which is something that has happened to me quite a lot as IT administrators. One of our big duties is to script things, whether it’s maintenance or productivity tasks. A lot of the time, we start working at a company, and some scripts have already been created for us, especially in some systems that maybe we do not know as much about because, as IT administrators, we manage so many systems. So, in this case, I work at a company, and then I have this report here that another admin created before I joined the company, but I don’t really understand it. So, what I can do is I can ask Claude to explain the following PowerShell script for me. It will analyze the script and then explain to me what each property does. In the end, I even have the summary: in summary, the script retrieves all the SharePoint online sites in the current tenant, selects the site URL, current storage usage, storage quota, and the percentage of the quota used. The output is then sorted in descending order based on the current storage usage, and it tells me how this can be helpful. You can see for each property selected, it’s telling me exactly what it does. So, AI can be a great way for you to better understand the scripts that you are running.

Now, let’s take a look at another example because Claude can not only understand scripts but it can also create them. I could ask Claude, “Can you create a new PowerShell script for me that will add a new user to Azure AD?” Here are the properties: first name Vlad, last name Catrinescu, I have the username in there, the country and I’m also telling it what PowerShell module to use. I’m telling it, “Hey, use the PowerShell SDK module.” So, let’s let it run a little bit here. It will always take one or two seconds. You see, at the end, I’m telling it to use the Graph PowerShell SDK. If you want it to use a certain module or a certain API, be specific because the more specific you are with generative AI solutions, the better result you will get, or you will get a result that matches your expectations. So, here in this case, as you can see, it gave me a PowerShell script. It even added the import modules, it added the connect to the MG graph, all the properties that I gave it, and then it created the new user. Awesome! I even have the breakdown of the script so I can better understand it. But remember, creating scripts with generative AI is a bit like copying scripts off the internet. Make sure to always test them in Dev or in QA before you run them in production. Never copy-paste scripts off the internet. That’s the first rule for IT professionals.

Okay, now let’s talk about something else to do with scripting because I’m going to switch subjects here at the left. I will start a new chat because generative AI solutions have a memory; they understand the context of the current chat. So, as we’ve been talking about PowerShell, I want to talk about something else now, and it’s always better to start a new chat and tell it, “Hey, we are going to switch subjects. Forget that I asked you about SharePoint and Azure AD and PowerShell. We are going to now talk about something completely new.” So, I can also ask Claude questions about a certain script. For example, I can ask it, “I need to create a new virtual machine in AWS by script. What language can I use?” Now it will tell me all the different languages that I can use to do that, and it will even give me some examples. In this case, it was a Python script that it gave me. Great! I can read all of that. You see, it explains to me each one of them, what it can do. Now, let me ask it, let’s go to the bottom here, I want to ask it, “Give me a script to create a virtual machine in my default region. The image ID is,” and I have an ID here, I have the instance type, the key name, and the security group. Notice I did not say in AWS; however, because of the context of the conversation, it knows that it’s in AWS here, so I didn’t need to specify it. That’s why it’s important to start a new conversation when you switch subjects. Now it knows we are talking about AWS, so whatever I ask it now if I don’t specify, it will assume it has to do with AWS. Because the previous one, gave me a Python script using Boto3, you can see the script that it gave me here also uses the same language. Again, if I wanted C# or I wanted something else, I should have specified it. Awesome!

Okay, let’s start a new chat and let’s look at a final example for scripting. I can ask Claude, “Hey, I’m running into an error with the following script. Can you tell me what I did wrong?” Now it will look over the script and it will tell me what I did wrong. So, it looks like you’re trying to display disk information using the Get-WmiObject cmdlet in PowerShell. That’s exactly what I’m doing. However, there seems to be a syntax issue with the way you’re constructing the calculated properties. So now it’s telling me, “Hey, you need to wrap the script blocks (the expressions) within curly braces with double quotation marks.” It explains to me everything and it gives me the corrected version. Awesome!

Okay, this is it for this quick demo on how we can use Claude to be more productive when working with scripts.

TFS215106: Access Denied. needs Queue builds permissions.

Vlad Catrinescu — Thu, 16 Jan 2014 16:00:00 GMT

When Trying to Queue a new Build Definition, You might get this error: TFS215106: Access denied. Domain\User needs Delete build definition permissions for the build definition MybuildDefintion in team project MyTeamProject to perform this action.

You might get this even if you are a Project Administrator or have all the other rights in TFS because the inheritance for builds might have been broken to provide more security. For example, in my organization, only 2 persons are allowed to launch Build Definitions in UAT and Production. If you ONLY need access on this build right click the build name and click Security.

Then add yourself with all the permissions…. However if you’re a TFS Admin and you will have to deploy more builds you can go in the security of the TFS Server by right clicking on your default collection, clicking on Team Project Collection Settings and then Group Membership.

And then add your username to the Project Collection Build Administrators Group.

TFS Permissions do not sync to Web Access and no more emails are sent

Vlad Catrinescu — Thu, 09 Jan 2014 16:00:16 GMT

I recently had a problem where suddenly TFS stopped sending emails and alerts. Furthermore, there was a permission bug with all new projects: The permissions were working perfectly in the SharePoint Site, however no one had the permissions in TFS Web Access.

The problem was that the Visual Studio Team Foundation Background Job Agent service was stopped. The Visual Studio Team Foundation Background Job Agent service provides a general scheduling mechanism for Web services and jobs for Team Foundation. This Windows service is also used to run the tasks spawned by various wizards, such as the New Team Project wizard and create a Team Project Collection wizard. The service uses the service account for Team Foundation Server (TFS), referred to as TFSService. The service runs on any server that is running a Web service or Web application in the logical application tier for Team Foundation. To operate correctly, the service account for the Team Foundation Background Job Agent service must have the permissions required for the tasks that it performs.

The service should be on Automatic Startup and should always be running! If you ever experience problems like the ones I had, make sure the service is running!

The isCleanMSDeployPackageNeeded task failed unexpectedly when deploying from TFS Build Server

Vlad Catrinescu — Tue, 07 Jan 2014 16:00:58 GMT

When deploying a .Net Application to IIS using TFS Build Server and MSBuild, you might get the following error:

C:\Program Files\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\Web\Microsoft.Web.Publishing.targets (2850): The “IsCleanMSDeployPackageNeeded” task failed unexpectedly. System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object. at Microsoft.Web.Publishing.Tasks.Common.Utility.CheckMSDeploymentVersion() at Microsoft.Web.Publishing.Tasks.Common.Utility.get_IsMSDeployInstalled()

This can simply be because you have not installed Web Deploy 2.0 on your TFS Server. The Web Deploy is actually the one deploying your ASP.Net application to the remote IIS in the background, and if you don’t have it installed on your TFS Server, it won’t find the binaries and give you this error. You can download Web Deploy here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/download/details.aspx?id=25230

Deploying from TFS gives error Web deployment task failed. (Site http: does not exist.)

Vlad Catrinescu — Thu, 28 Nov 2013 16:00:23 GMT

When you’re deploying your Web Application from TFS to an IIS Web Application you might encounter the error Web deployment task failed. (Site http: does not exist.)

If you got this error, it’s probably because in TFS you set the”/p:DeployIISAppPath” to the URL of a website, for example /p:DeployIISAppPath=”http://vlad.domain.com” . The correct way to specify the parameter is giving the actual name of the website from IIS, for example /p:DeployIISAppPath=”Default Web Site” . Now your error should go away!

Windows Server 2012 – Windows Desktop Search is not available

Vlad Catrinescu — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 23:02:00 GMT

Hello

This post is not related to SharePoint, however I did not find it anywhere else so I thought it was good to post it.

I just updated my main laptop to Windows Server 2012 and when I installed Office 2010, I got the Outlook error – ” Windows Desktop Search is not available”.

In Server 2008R2 you had to activate Windows Search from Server Manager > Roles > File server.

However, in Server 2012 they put the Windows Search in Server Manager> Features > Windows Search.

You just install the Feature, restart Outlook and it’s fixed.

Say Thanks if it helped 🙂