What is Cloud Computing? — Cloud Computing : Part I

In this blog post lets discuss about the basics of Cloud computing.

What is Cloud?

The cloud is something present in a remote location. Cloud provides services over public and private networks such as VPN, LAN etc.

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud Computing is the delivery of computer services which includes storage, databases, servers, networking, software, analytics and intelligence over the internet. It refers to manipulating, configuring and accessing the hardware and software resources remotely.

Since cloud computing provides platform independency it makes our applications collaborative and mobile.

Basic Concepts

Certain services and concepts are at work behind the scenes to make cloud computing practical and available to end users. Following are 2 such models,

1. Deployment models
2. Service models

Deployment models

Deployment model defines the type of access to the cloud. Cloud has 4 types of deployment models namely,

1. Public Cloud
   Public clouds are available to the general public, in which the data is created and stored on third-party servers.
2. Private Cloud
   Only one specific company owns a private cloud hence it is also called an internal or corporate model.
3. Community Cloud
   Community cloud allows systems and services to be accessible by a group of organizations.
4. Hybrid Cloud
   A hybrid cloud encompasses the best features of public, private and community deployment models. Critical activities are performed using the private cloud while non critical activities are performed using the public cloud.

For more details on cloud deployment models you can check out my article
4 best cloud deployment models.

Service Models

Cloud computing is centered around service models. There are 3 basic service models.

1. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
   Infrastructure as a service is the most basic level of service. IaaS provides access to basic resources such as physical machines, virtual machines, virtual storage etc.
2. Platform as a Service (PaaS)
   PaaS provides the runtime environment for development, applications, deployment tools, etc.
3. Software as a Service (SaaS)
   The SaaS model provides software applications as a service to end users.

In addition to the 3 basic service models Cloud Computing also has,
4. Anything as a Service (XaaS) model which includes,
i. Network-as-a-Service
ii. Business-as-a-Service
iii. Identity-as-a-Service
iv. Database-as-a-Service
v. Strategy-as-a-Service

Service models

Benefits of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has numerous advantages.

• It is not required to install a software to access or manipulate cloud applications.
• Can manipulate and configure the applications online at any time.
• Facilitates the access of applications as utilities over the internet.
• Cost effective due to high efficiency with optimum utilization.
• Cloud computing provides online programming runtime environments and development and deployment tools through the Platform-as-a-service model.
• Cloud computing provides on-demand self-service. Resources can be used without interacting with the cloud service provider.
• Cloud computing offers load balancing.

Risks of Cloud Computing

Just like there are numerous advantages there are a few risks that comes along with cloud computing.

• Security and Privacy concerns
  Since infrastructure and data management is handled by a 3rd party it is a risk to give sensitive information to the cloud service providers.
• Lock in
  It is difficult to switch from one Cloud Service Provider to another. Due to this there is a high dependency on a particular Cloud Service Provider for service.
• Management interface compromise
  Customer management interfaces are accessible through the internet in the case of public cloud providers.
• Isolation failure
  Complications arise when multiple resources start using the shared resources at the same time. This can create isolation failure in which one organization’s data or resources will have access to other organization’s data and resources and vice versa.

We just had a look at the following,

• What is Cloud?
• What is Cloud Computing?
• Deployment models
• Service models
• Benefits
• Risks

Hope you got a basic idea about Cloud Computing.

Tune in to the Cloud Computing series as I will be discussing more about Cloud Computing and everything you need to know about it.