Introduction to Cloud Computing

What is cloud computing?

suppose if you own a bus seat booking service and a request comes to you for seat booking so you check the total number of seats left and allocate the required number of seats to the customer. But what if this one request turns into thousands of request then that one server cannot manage such a huge amount of load. At that moment you can think of taking some servers on rent so the load will be shared and your work will be done very easily. But the demand doesn’t remain the same throughout the year, right? Sometimes the demand for bus tickets increases especially during the holiday season and then sometimes decreases, so at that moment your extra number of servers will be doing nothing that means a complete waste of money. Instead of deploying more server you can simply take the help of the cloud. The cloud on demand will provide you the required number of servers or database and you have to only pay for what you are using. It can be either a server or a database anything. And after you are done with your work you can free the resources. It mostly happens on a subscription basis. And if after a few days you again need some resources you can demand it again and pay for only what you are using.

So in technical words:-

Cloud computing can be defined as the availability of various services that they provide like system resource management and computing performance, server, database, networking, software, analysis, intelligence over the internet and etc. The term cloud basically refers to the data centers in which the user can operate over the internet.

Large cloud service providers are like Google cloud, Microsoft Azure, Amazon cloud, IBM Cloud, Adobe creative cloud and there are many more. They have data centers located all over the world.

Clouds can be limited to one single organization which is known as enterprise cloud or many organizations which is known as the public cloud. The main aim of cloud computing is to allow the users to take full befits of all technologies present in the market without the help of any kind of deep knowledge about that particular technology which they are going to use.

What are the advantages of cloud computing?

1. Cost- How cloud computing cuts the cost?

Cloud computing eliminates the cost of buying hardware, software and running an on-site data center. Cloud provides the servers, storage, network, database for building websites or containers and microservices for building a web application or android application and the IT experts for managing the infrastructure and various other things as well at a very low cost.

2. Speed- Most of the cloud providers provide self-service and are on-demand so even a vast amount of computing resources can be resolved in minutes.

3. Global Scale — The benefits of cloud computing is that it includes the ability to scale elastically. This means that providing the right amount of IT resources like more computing power or less computing power, storage bandwidth, etc.

4. Productivity- What happens with on-site data centers is that they require a lot of hardware setup, software patching and other time consuming IT stuff. Cloud providers makes the job more easier for these big IT companies so that their teams can spend more time on achieving more important goals.

5. Performance- The biggest cloud computing services run on a worldwide network of data centers which are regularly upgraded to the latest generation and efficient computer hardware so as a result of which network latency will be reduced.

6. Security- Many cloud providers offer a broad set of policies, latest and new technologies as a result of which it strengthens the overall security posture. It helps in protecting our data, applications, and infrastructure from various kinds of threats.

There are three types of cloud services:-

1. Public cloud — the public cloud is the third-party cloud service provider that delivers computing resources like storage, server over the internet. A public cloud will own all the hardware, software and other supporting infrastructure and it will be managed by them as well. We can access these services only on a subscription basis through a web browser.

2. Private cloud- If a big IT company uses the cloud computing resources exclusively for its own use then that is known as the private cloud. Now a private cloud can be physically placed in companies on-site data centers. Some companies also pay various private cloud providers to manage their resources.

3. Hybrid cloud- Hybrid cloud can be defined as the combination of both public clouds as well as the private cloud. Both information, data and application are shared between the public and private cloud. Because of this flow of data and application between the public and private cloud, the business of the IT companies will increase, gives the business greater flexibility and more deployment options and also improve the existing infrastructure and security.

Types of cloud services:-

There are three types of cloud services

1. Infrastructure as a service- Iaas is the most basic type of cloud where you rent various IT companies storage, virtual machines, operating system, network on a payment basis.
2. Platform as a service- Paas is referred to that kind of cloud computing service where services are provided on-demand, like delivering, managing or developing various software. Paas is also helpful to developers like website developers or android developers or web app developers so that they can easily develop something without worrying about servers, database, network or storage.

3. Software as a service- Saas is the type of a cloud service where software applications are delivered over the internet. Some basic examples of the software applications are Microsoft office, chrome, AutoCAD, MySQL, etc. The cloud providers will manage everything related to that software application which includes software updates, security patching, etc. These services will be provided on demand over the internet typically on a subscription basis. The user will have to connect the software application over the internet.

Uses of the cloud:-

1. We can build an android application or a web application and store it in the cloud which will be termed as cloud-native application. The cloud on demand will provide us database, server, microservices, containers which will help us to easily build an application.
2. We can store, backup, and recover our data. We don’t have to worry anymore about data.

3. Various web applications like Netflix or amazon prime video works on the application of cloud. If we have their subscription then we can easily download whatever we want to and store it in our cloud.

4. Deliver software on-demand software will be delivered on-demand as per requirement by Saas. There is also another thing known as DevOps, it is a kind of collaboration between software developers and its operators to develop, test, design and deliver software in the most effective way on-demand and as quickly as possible.

5. Artificial Intelligence will be provided on demand by the cloud for better functioning and working on any field required.

This is indeed my first blog and I tried to give basic information about cloud computing and I hope people reading this will have some idea what cloud actually is.

Thank you.