What is cloud computing? Everything you need to know about the Cloud Computing

Why cloud? Let’s try to to figure out. Before that we will try to understand the situation that was existed before cloud come in to play. Suppose that you want to host a website, there are many things that you have to consider. First you have to buy a stack of servers. And we all know that servers are very costly, so we will ended up by spending lot of money.

Next thing is the issue of traffic, as we all know if we are hosting a website, we are dealing with a traffic which is not constant throughout the day. Since the traffic is varying, your servers will be idle most of the time. And the other thing is monitoring and maintaining the servers, it is a very big problem. Other than that troubleshooting problems can be tedious and may conflict with your business goals. Moreover you have to consider about the amount of data generated now and amount of data generated then. Now a days we know that all most everything go online these days, that means we shop online, we buy foods online, and we do most of our day today activities online. That means we have huge amount of data generated. So we have to find out a space to go ahead and maintain these data. Because of all these problems cloud computing becomes more important. Let’s try to understand what is cloud computing.

What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing is a simple term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet. These services can be categorized into three categories: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Cloud computing can be considered as a more efficient way of delivering computing resources. Users can pay a monthly fee instead of buying licenses and can subscribed to cloud computing, software and service environments. Generally cloud providers manage the software and platforms and they updated those continuously for maximum performance and security. A major functionality is users can tap into extra capacity if business spikes because of computing power is remote instead of centralized. Multiple people can access a shared application or file and collaborate in real time from different locations.

A cloud service has three distinct characteristics when it compares with traditional web hosting. Cloud services are sold on demand, that means by the minute or the hour basis.It is a completely elastic service where a user can have much or little of a service as they required at any given time. Moreover the service is fully managed by the provider which means the consumer needs nothing but a personal computer and Internet access.

Because of the innovations in virtualization and distributed computing, as well as improved access to high-speed Internet, interest in cloud computing increasing rapidly day by day.

Normally a cloud can be private or public. Anyone on the Internet can get cloud services from a public cloud. But a limited number of people is able to get hosted services from a private cloud provider. Usually it is a proprietary network or a data center. The goal of cloud computing is to provide easy, scalable access to computing resources and IT services where ever private cloud or a public cloud.

Different Types Of Cloud Computing Deployment Models

Most cloud services have tens of thousands of servers and storage devices to enable fast loading. It is often possible to choose a geographic area to put the data “closer” to users. Typically, deployment models of cloud computing are categorized based on their location. Let’s figure out what are available cloud deployment models.

Private Cloud

It is a cloud-based infrastructure used by stand-alone organizations. Cloud services are delivered from a business’s data center to internal users. It offers greater control over security. The data is backed up by a firewall and internally, and can be hosted internally or externally. Private clouds are perfect for organizations that have high-security requirements, high management demands, and availability requirements. Common private cloud technologies and providers are VMware and OpenStack.

Public Cloud

In the public cloud model, a third-party cloud service provider delivers the cloud service over the internet. So the customers have no control over the location of the infrastructure.Public cloud services are sold on demand, typically by the minute or hour, though long-term commitments are available for many services. Customers only pay for the CPU cycles, storage or bandwidth they consume.Public deployment models in the cloud are perfect for organizations with growing and fluctuating demands. It is also popular among businesses of all sizes for their web applications, web-mail, and storage of non-sensitive data. Popular public cloud service providers include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, IBM and Google Cloud Platform.

Community Cloud

It is a mutually shared model between organizations that belong to a particular community such as banks, government organizations, or commercial enterprises. Community members generally share similar issues of privacy, performance, and security. This type of deployment model of cloud computing is managed and hosted internally or by a third-party vendor.

Hybrid Cloud

This model combines the best of both private and public clouds, where as each can remain as separate entities. Further, as part of this deployment of cloud computing model, the internal, or external providers can provide resources. A hybrid cloud is ideal for salability, flexibility, and security. A perfect example of this scenario would be that of an organization who uses the private cloud to secure their data and interacts with its customers using the public cloud.

Cloud computing characteristics and benefits

Cloud computing generates several mind blowing benefits for businesses and end users. Five of the main benefits of cloud computing can be list as follows:

• Self-service provisioning: End users can spin up compute resources for almost any type of workload on demand. This eliminates the traditional need for IT administrators to provision and manage compute resources.
• Elasticity: Companies can scale up as computing needs increase and scale down again as demands decrease. This eliminates the need for massive investments in local infrastructure, which may or may not remain active.
• Pay per use: Compute resources are measured at a granular level, enabling users to pay only for the resources and workloads they use.
• Workload resilience: Cloud service providers often implement redundant resources to ensure resilient storage and to keep users’ important workloads running — often across multiple global regions.
• Migration flexibility: Organizations can move certain workloads to or from the cloud — or to different cloud platforms — as desired or automatically for better cost savings or to use new services as they emerge.

Types of cloud computing services

With the evolution of cloud computing over time, it has been divided into three broad service categories: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS).

Cloud computing service providers, such as AWS, provides a virtual server instance and storage, and also they provide APIs that enable users to migrate their workloads to a virtual machine. Users have an allocated storage capacity and can start, stop, access and configure the virtual machine and storage as desired. IaaS providers offer small, medium, large, extra-large and memory- or compute-optimized instances, in addition to customized instances, for various workload needs.

In the PaaS model, cloud computing service providers host development tools on their infrastructures. Users access these tools over the internet using APIs, web portals or gateway software. PaaS is used for general software development, and many PaaS providers host the software after it’s developed. Common PaaS providers include Salesforce’s Force.com, AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Google App Engine.

SaaS is a distribution model that delivers software applications over the internet; these applications are often called web services. Users can access SaaS applications and services from any location using a computer or mobile device that has internet access. One common example of a SaaS application is Microsoft Office 365 for productivity and email services.

Emerging cloud technologies and services

Cloud providers are competitive, and they constantly expand their services to differentiate themselves. This has led public IaaS providers to offer far more than common compute and storage instances.

For example, serverless, or event-driven computing is a cloud service that executes specific functions, such as image processing and database updates. Traditional cloud deployments require users to establish a compute instance and load code into that instance. Then, the user decides how long to run — and pay for — that instance.

With serverless computing, developers simply create code, and the cloud provider loads and executes that code in response to real-world events, so users don’t have to worry about the server or instance aspect of the cloud deployment. Users only pay for the number of transactions that the function executes. AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions and Azure Functions are examples of serverless computing services.

Public cloud computing also lends itself well to big data processing, which demands enormous compute resources for relatively short durations. Cloud providers have responded with big data services, including Google BigQuery for large-scale data warehousing and Microsoft Azure Data Lake Analytics for processing huge data sets.

Another main cloud technology is artificial intelligence and machine learning. AI and ML are creating waves in cloud vendors as well. Every cloud provider is trying to integrate as many as AI, ML and Deep Learning services as possible. And almost all of them also provide services to build custom models. Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine and Google Cloud Speech API are services available in Google Cloud Platform, whereas in AWS we have Amazon Machine Learning, and AWS has Rekognition.

Cloud computing security

Security must be a primary factor that should be essentially consider when ever a businesses is going to cloud adoption. Cloud computing security, consists of a set of policies, controls, procedures and technologies that is co-related to protect cloud-based systems, data and infrastructure. To protect data, support regulatory compliance and protect customers’ privacy as well as setting authentication rules for individual users and devices configuring these security measures is a must. Cloud security can be configured from authenticating access to filtering traffic, to achieve the security requirement of the business organizations.

If you want to get the best from the cloud and ensure your organization is protected from unauthorized access, data breaches and other threats, you have to select a right cloud security solution for your business according to the need.