what is cloud computing?

what is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing

techeeINDIA

Cloud computing is internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand, like the electricity grid. A basic definition of cloud computing is the use of the internet for the tasks you perform on your computer for storage, retrieval and access. The “cloud” represent the internet. Cloud computing is a new name for an old concept: the delivery of computing services from a remote location. cloud computing services are delivered through a network, usually the internet.

Characteristics: -

cloud computing has five essential characteristics: -

1)   On demand self-services: - Users are able to provision, monitor and manage computing resources as needed without the help of human administrators.

2)  Broad network access: - Computing services are delivered over standard networks and heterogeneous devices.

3)  Rapid elasticity: - IT resources are able to scale out and in quickly and on as needed basis.

4) Resource pooling: - IT resources are shared across multiple applications and tenants in a non-dedicated manner. 

5) Measured services: - IT resource utilization is tracked for each application and tenant, typically for public cloud billing or private cloud chargeback.

techeeINDIA

Layers of cloud computing system: -

The cloud computing system has mainly these layers: Client, Application, Platform, and infrastructure. (Additionally, server is also sometimes considered as layer as the server makes available hardware and software products that are specially designed for the delivery of cloud services.)

Let us talk about these four layers one by one:

a)  Client: - The client consists of hardware and software that access cloud services. The client can be a thick client or a thin client. A thick client refers to a fully functionality needed to accomplish the necessary tasks. Examples of thin clients include new age smartphones, tablets etc.

b) Application layer or Software as a service (SaaS): - In this layer, a complete application is offered to the customer, as a service on demand. A single instant of the service runs on the cloud & multiple end users are serviced. On the customer's side, there is no need for upfront investment in servers or software licenses, while for the provider, the costs are lowered, since only a single application needs to be hosted and maintained. Today SaaS is offered by companies such as Google, Salesforce, Microsoft, zoho, etc.

c)  Platform as a service (Paas): - Here, a layer of software, or development environment is encapsulated & offered as a service, upon which other higher levels of service can be built. The customer has the freedom to build his own applications, which run on the providers infrastructure. To meet manageability and scalability requirements of the applications, PaaS providers offer a predefined combination of OS and application servers, such as LAMP platform (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP), restricted J2EE, Ruby etc. Googles App Engine, Force.com, etc. are some of the popular PaaS examples.

d) Infrastructure as a service (IaaS): -IaaS provides basic storage and computing capabilities as standardized services over the networks. Servers, storage system, networking equipment, data Centre space etc. are pooled and made available to handle workloads. The customer would typically deploy his own software on the infrastructure. Some common examples are Amazon, GoGrid, 3 tera, etc.

Deployments models: -

techeeINDIA

There are different types of clouds that you can subscribe to depending on your needs. As a home user or small business owner, you will most likely use public cloud services. Enterprises can choose to deploy applicants on Public, Private or Hybrid clouds.

Four deployment models of clouds are: -

1.   Private clouds: -

These are the clouds for exclusive use by a single organization and typically controlled, managed and hosted in private data centers. The hosting and operation of private clouds may also be outsourced to a third-party service provider, but a private cloud remains for the exclusive use of one organization.

2.  Public clouds: -

These are the clouds for use by multiple organizations (tenants) on a shared basis and hosted and managed by a third-party service provider.

3.  Community clouds: -

These are the clouds for use by a group of related organizations who wish to make use of a common cloud computing environment. For example, a community might consist of the different branches of the military, all the universities in a given region, or all the suppliers to a large manufacturer.

4. Hybrid clouds: -

When a single organization adopts both private and public clouds for a single application in order to take advantage of the benefits of both. For example. In a cloud bursting scenario, an organization might run the steady-state workload of an application on a private cloud, but when a spike in workload occurs, such as at the end of the financial quarter or during the holiday season, they can burst out to use computing capacity from a public cloud, then return those resources to the public pool when they are no longer needed.  

-Jai Hind

what is cloud computing?

    i.