What is cloud computing? So that is the topic of this Article. Now you may have heard of people talking about the cloud, such as cloud computing or cloud storage, but you probably weren't sure exactly what it was.
Well, the term cloud computing refers to data and applications being stored and
run on the cloud rather than being stored and run on your local computer or on any equipment that you own. Then this data and the applications which are on the cloud are accessed through the internet So the workload is no longer on your computer or on any equipment that you own, it's on the cloud.
So what is the cloud? Now to put it simply, the cloud is just a big building that's filled with computers. To be specific, it's a big building filled with servers and servers are just computers that provide services on behalf of clients.
Now, these buildings are very large, and well they have to be because when you take a look inside, it's a giant data center that contains servers as far as the eye can see. And these servers perform numerous tasks, such as running applications, storing data, data processing, web hosting, and so on. And they are also all networked together and they can be accessed on the internet.
So what is the purpose of a cloud? Well, the companies that own these clouds are called cloud providers and their purpose is to sell their computers as a service. Now service is just something that you pay someone to do for you rather than doing the job yourself. So if a person or a company wanted to hire another company to do part or all of their computing workload, they would outsource it to a third party.
In other words, they would use cloud computing So back in the old days before cloud computing and as an example, we'll use email. So at your home or office if you wanted to use email you would have your own physical email server. So you would have a server, an operating system, and email software such as Microsoft exchange. And then after some configuration, you would be able to use email.
But the problem is, is that if anything goes wrong with the server, such as a hardware failure or a software problem, or if the operating system crashed, then you would be responsible for fixing the problem, not to mention any maintenance that is needed to keep the server up and running.
However, you do have the option of eliminating all the hassle and upkeep of your own email server and having another company host all of your email on their servers in the cloud for you, such as Gmail Hotmail and a bunch of others. But email is just one example of cloud computing. There are also other services such as productivity software, web servers, databases, and even Youtube.
So yes, you as an individual can use Youtube as a cloud So if you're a video creator and instead of building and maintaining your own video server and software and the extremely high cost of internet bandwidth that you would need for people to watch your videos from your server, you can bypass that and you can just upload your videos to Youtube and let Youtube handle everything for you. But instead of directly paying youtube like a regular cloud provider, Youtube will get a share of the ad revenue generated by your videos.
So another question is, why would an individual or a company use cloud computing? Well as I just mentioned a major reason is a cost. With cloud computing, a person
or company eliminates a lot of the expense of buying their own hardware and software, along with the building maintenance and electricity it takes to run their own data center. So it would be more cost-efficient to use a cloud instead. And another reason is reliability. Because when you hire a cloud, the cloud provider is responsible for all of the data backup and disaster recovery. And if one of its data centers goes down, it will also have several redundant sites as a backup which will ensure that there is no downtime. And another reason is scalability.
Cloud providers will offer a 'pay as you go' method where you can pay for only what you need. So whether you need to rent a few computers or a lot, it doesn't matter. So if you only want to rent a small number of computers to start out, you can do that. But as your business expands, you have the option of instantly renting more computers to suit your needs And if you don't need to rent as many computers, you can instantly scale back to renting only a few So who are the cloud providers today?
Well, the major cloud providers today are Amazon Web Services (AWS). Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Alibaba, and IBM. Amazon Web Services is the biggest of them all - taking about a third of the cloud market share. In fact one of AWS' biggest customers is Netflix. Netflix uses Amazon Web Services for nearly all of its computer and storage needs including databases, analytics, video transcoding, and so on. So instead of building its own data center and spending hundreds of millions of dollars on hosting its own data, Netflix chose to outsource it to a cloud provider which isAmazon.
So a major advantage that Netflix has of using a cloud is that they don't have to worry about downtime, security, data backup, or the high cost of building and maintaining their own data center. They can just pay Amazon to do it for them
So this takes a tremendous burden off of Netflix which allows them to focus on other things pertaining to their business.
Now there are three different types of cloud computing. There's infrastructure as a service or (IaaS). Platform as a service or (PaaS) and Software as a service or (SaaS). And these three vary in control and flexibility.
So it's up to the user to decide what suits their needs. So the first one is infrastructure as a service. Now, this type is basically where you're going to let the cloud provider manage a portion of your business which is going to be the hardware portion. The cloud provider will manage the servers, storage, virtualization, and networking portion.
You on the other hand will still have control over the software portion. Such as the applications, data, operating system, middleware, and runtime. Some examples of infrastructure as a service that the common person would use would be online data back-ups services, such as iDrive and Carbonite that provide cloud storage. And the next one is called platform as a service.
Now (PaaS) like (IaaS) allows the cloud provider to manage a portion of your
business. But the cloud provider has more control. In a (PaaS) the cloud provider not only manages the hardware such as servers, storage, and networking, but it also manages the operating system, middleware, and runtime. You on the other hand are only responsible for the applications and the data.
And finally, there's software as a service (SaaS) Now this is probably the most common cloud service by far. In this type, all the applications are hosted by the cloud provider. There is no software to install on your computer and no hardware to manage. You just simply access and run the application from your computer when you connect to the cloud service through the internet.
So the cloud provider manages all the hardware, software, networking, operating system, and storage. A good example of (SaaS) is something that I use all the time, which is Google Docs. Google Docs is a free online office suite that is accessed using a web browser. There is no additional software that needs to be installed on your computer to use Google Docs. Everything is accessed and managed from your web browser.
