Database and Servers - Servers for Websites, Cloud Services for softwares
The term "cloud computing" is most likely derived from network diagrams where the shapes of clouds are used to describe different types of networks, such as the Internet or internal networks. According to several sources, cloud computing is a collection of applications delivered as services along with the data center hardware and software that enables the applications. Others argue that cloud computing is a business model, not a specific technology or service. Cloud computing is still a comparatively new service but it is being used by numerous different organizations starting from small businesses to big corporations, from non-profits to government agencies, and even individual consumers for that matter.
Cloud computing, in our opinion, consists of both technological and business components. Certain cloud-enabling technologies significantly aided in the formation of the cloud, and cloud computing would not have been possible without them. Cloud-enabled in the form of open-source software, virtualization, distributed storage, distributed databases, and monitoring systems are the foundations of cloud infrastructure, as we will see in the following chapter.
Cloud Computing assumes that any software application or system component is a service or service component. As a result, the architecture of new or existing systems may need to be modified in order to be cloud compatible. As a result, in order to realize the value of the cloud and make it available to an organization, business owners must typically make significant structural changes to internal IT organizations and evangelize cloud philosophy to employees.
Cloud computing basically refers to the delivery of various services via Internet. These resources consist of tools and applications such as data storage, servers, databases, networking, and software.
Unlike a traditional IT environment where software and hardware take months to finish implementation, cloud based services deploy IT resources in minutes to hours while aligning costs to actual usage, simultaneously. Consequently, organizations have higher agility that makes expense management more efficient. Likewise, cloud based services can also be used to make application utilization more comprehensible. It facilitates storing, sharing and protecting content, and enables access to it from any web-connected device.
Cloud computing is eventually turning into a popular option for people and businesses for a number of other reasons too including expense reduction, increased productivity, speed and efficiency, performance, and security.
Types of Cloud Computing
Unlike a traditional IT environment where software and hardware take months to finish implementation, cloud based services deploy IT resources in minutes to hours while aligning costs to actual usage, simultaneously. Consequently, organizations have higher agility that makes expense management more efficient. Likewise, cloud based services can also be used to make application utilization more comprehensible. It facilitates storing, sharing and protecting content, and enables access to it from any web-connected device.
Cloud computing is a system primarily comprising of three services: software-as-a-service (SaaS), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), and platform-as-a-service (PaaS).
1. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) involves the license of a software application to customers. Licenses are typically provided through a pay-as-you-go model or on-demand.
2. Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) involves a technique used for delivering everything from operating systems to storage and servers through IP-based connectivity as part of an on-demand service. Clients can dodge the need to procure software or servers, and instead purchase these resources in an outsourced, on-demand service.
3. Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) is believed to be the most complex of the three layers of cloud-based computing. PaaS is majorly similar to SaaS with the primary difference being that rather than delivering software online, it actually comes across to be a platform for creating software that is delivered via the Internet.
Why Cloud Computing?
Let's look at some of the most important factors driving businesses to use cloud computing.
1. Elasticity
Being able to scale processing capacity up and down on demand is essential. Consider a company that provides software as service (SaaS) online tax filing services. Obviously, with such a business model, this organization's computing resource demand will peak during tax season – only two to three months per year. From a financial point of view, there is no point in investing upstream knowing that the IT infrastructure will only be partially deployed for nine or ten months of the year.
2. Pay-As-You-Grow
Public cloud providers to avoid large upfront infrastructure investments and purchase new computing resources as needed – businesses do not need to plan and commit financial resources in advance. This model is particularly suitable for small businesses and start-ups, which cannot often afford to spend large amounts of money at the beginning of their business trip.
3. Responsibilities and Infrastructure Costs in the Room
Running information technology within a company entails significant liability and costs. Although some may argue that the implementation infrastructure within the organization is safer and cheaper, it is not always the case. It may be worthwhile to run infrastructure from a public cloud depending on a company's IT budget, employee skills, and other factors. Public cloud providers could provide reasonable service-level agreements (SLAs) and handle any liability issues that company CIOs may encounter.
Why Now?
Why is cloud computing happening only now, instead of many years ago?
1. Economy of Scale
The massive growth of e-commerce, social media, and other Web 2.0 services has greatly increased the demand for computational resources. Companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft quickly realized that it is much more cost-effective to build a few large data centers than many small ones for their needs – it is much more cost-effective to buy resources like electricity, bandwidth, and storage in bulk. It becomes easier to maximize the amount of work per dollar spent in larger data centers: you can share components more efficiently, improve physical and virtual server density, reduce idle server times, and reduce the administrator/server ratio.
2. Expertise
Building a data center necessarily requires significant financial investment as well as technical expertise. Some businesses developed significant expertise in this area. After constructing data centres for their internal clouds, these companies realized they could use their existing expertise and technology to construct public cloud data centers and provide computing services to other businesses.
3. Commodity Hardware
Drops in computer chip production costs, architecture standardization around the x86 platform, and increased mechanical compatibility of internal PC components all contributed to a significant decrease in computer hardware costs over the last decade. The low cost of hardware has contributed to its commoditization, which has resulted in lower computational costs.
4. Virtualization
Hardware virtualization has increased the density of hardware utilization and ensures more efficient use of hardware resources. This is one of the technologies that enables elasticity, and as a result, it has increased flexibility in terms of deployment speed, dynamic auto-provisioning, and cloud management.
5. Open-Source Software
Open-Source commodity software and hardware are key drivers of cloud computing. The Open-Source commodity software and hardware are key drivers of cloud computing. Similarly, Amazon uses the virtualization software Xen to host the world's largest set of virtual machines, and Hadoop distributes a computing platform that enables thousands of businesses to run massive parallel computations in the cloud. One of the factors that enable businesses to provide affordable cloud services is the ability to avoid expensive software license costs.