All you need to know about Cloud Computing
You have certainly heard about Cloud computing with all the fancy things about it, let’s together find out what is behind this revolutionary field.
What we will discuss in this article
· What is Cloud Computing?
· History of Cloud Computing
· Cloud Computing subcategories
What is cloud computing?
Cloud computing is a paradigm based on the concept of on-demand and dynamic provisioning of high level services such as computation, storage, networking, IT infrastructure in general. All those resources are available through Internet.
Web hosting and Cloud computing?
During the creation of the web it was only intended for scientific use, it was then open to the general public. When the web became public, if a company or a university needed to put its content on the web, it must have its own servers, maintainers and administrators, which was expensive to them, and small businesses meanwhile could not afford it.
In 1994, GeoCities, the first company allowing individuals to be able to host their website on its servers by paying annually for management and maintenance was born, this is the current form of the majority of web hosting.
It happened that the formulas offered by these web hosts did not suit certain companies who wanted more, hence the birth of mutual hosting, where a company had the possibility of renting or corenting a physical server while leaving care to the server owner to ensure maintenance and continuous operation of the server.
In the early 2000s virtual machines became more and more popular. Virtual machine software (VM ware for example) makes it possible to have several virtual machines with different operating systems on a single physical machine, their birth revolutionized the world of computing and led to the birth of cloud computing.
On the opposite to the traditional web hosting and mutual hosting, with cloud computing, companies will only pay for what they use, they have direct access to their server, they can choose how to configure it, they can decide to switch from a formula to another one, easily without worrying about the price, all they need is just Internet access. One of the companies to have invested very early in this field was Amazon with Amazon web services .
We have thus seen the birth of several forms of services based on the concept of Cloud Computing, allowing us to use what we needed and pay only for that.
Cloud computing subcategories
- PaaS: Platform as a Service
If you are a developer you know how painful it can be to set up a development environment on your computer, if you are working with Java for example you have to install eclipse or netbeans, all the dependencies, manage the servers and many other stuff, despite all this, there is a big risk after developing your software or application when you are going to deploy it that it does not work on the production site, the famous sentence, “it is working on my pc”. PaaS allows you no longer to worry about all this by offering you a ready development and deployment environment whatever the technologies you used, ensuring that it will work everywhere else.
2. IaaS: Infrastructure as a Service
IaaS offers the possibility of establishing an infrastructure with servers, machines, storage space virtually with huge computing capacities that you could never imagine having on your local machine like the capacity of your RAM (20 gigabytes for example), your processor frequency, network services, so you can deploy everything you want on these machines, you can make them web servers, database servers etc…One of the advantage of IaaS is that, during the use of a resource, you can increase or decrease its capacity, the goal is to use what you need and pay only for it.
3. SaaS: Software as a Service
This is the most used cloud service today, back in times, to work with Microsoft Word or Excel you had to install it on your computer, pay the license even if you want to use it only once. Today all we need is an Internet connection to work on our spreadsheets on Excel, write reports with Microsoft word no more license or installation required, no more exorbitant license fees, you pay for the time you use, isn’t life good? There are many other examples of Saas, like image processing and design platforms like canva for example, or Microsoft 365 (Word, Excel, Power Point online) or G suite (drive, Google docs…) from Google, using Saas we can work on the same document with one or more people who are in different corners of the world.
Cloud computing companies’ leaders
Amazon web services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud are the leading cloud services from, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. They offer almost the same services, the difference lies in the formulas and especially the market shares. Amazon web services is currently the leader among them, particularly for its seniority on the market since 2004, Amazon was the first to invest and to believe that the Cloud would transform the world.
You can create your own cloud
Good news, if you are a fan of open source you can create your own private cloud using openstack, there are concepts that I have not discussed here like the difference between public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud that you can look for if you are interested.
Finally Cloud computing is a growing area many companies are looking for people with skills in this area, if you are interested you can pass certifications, all you need to know is that the Cloud is the future because it facilitates a lot of things, having a general knowledge even would be a plus for a computer scientist or a computer enthusiast.
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