What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing is the outsourcing of computing power – servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics – to offer the flexibility of resources and economies of scale.

Instead of setting up your own hardware, servers and infrastructure, hiring IT experts to maintain the hardware, setting up the electricity supply and cooling, you can easily outsource all the tasks to a cloud computing platform and focus on the core business needs.

Types of cloud computing

 

1. Public – In Public cloud platforms, the cloud resources like servers and storage are owned and operated by a third-party cloud service provider. With a public cloud, all hardware, software and other supporting infrastructure are owned and managed by the cloud provider. Some examples of cloud platforms are Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

In a public cloud, you share the same resources with other organizations and you access services and manage your account using a web browser.

Some benefits of Public Cloud platforms are:

  1. Lower costs
  2. Zero maintenance – the cloud platform does maintenance.
  3. High scalability
  4. High reliability – a global network of servers ensures redundancy and reduces risk due to calamities and failures.

2. Private – A private cloud consists of dedicated cloud computing resources exclusively for the use of a specific enterprise.

Private clouds are often used by government agencies, financial institutions, and any other organizations with critical operations seeking enhanced control over their environment.

Some advantages of a private cloud are:

Higher flexibility – Enterprise can customize its cloud to meet specific business needs.

Better control – dedicated resources , so higher levels of control and privacy are possible.

One disadvantage of a private cloud computing platform is that the onus of maintenance is on the organization, so extra overhead of hiring IT experts and equipment arises.

3. Hybrid – A hybrid cloud is more of an approach. Any enterprise may maintain their custom private cloud along with access to public cloud services.

This approach is beneficial due to business imperatives. Sometimes the data is just too sensitive for an enterprise to share it with any third party. Hence they can handle critical load on their cloud and outsource the rest to any public cloud platform, thus optimizing cost and handling data sovereignty.

The hybrid cloud approach is like the best of both worlds. Some advantages of the hybrid cloud are:

Control – Enterprise can maintain a private infrastructure for critical data, sensitive assets or low latency workloads.

Flexibility – Public cloud platforms provide a plethora of services. It is impractical for individual businesses to try and create custom cloud-based solutions after a point of time. Hence, additional resources from public cloud platforms can be customized and used with much lower expenditure.

Cost-efficient – Use private cloud for custom business needs, saving cost. Scale up to public cloud platforms as and when required, thus allowing to balance out the costs and business requirements.

Ease of transition 

Apart from the public, private and hybrid, cloud computing services can be classified into 4 groups:

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)

IaaS is a cloud computing service where enterprises lease computing power to the cloud platform. Users can run any applications on the servers without the overheads of maintenance. Enterprises use IaaS mainly because :

1. Global presence of cloud platforms – Access to servers in geographical locations close to the end-users.

2. Scalability – No need to manually regulate hardware as per demand, can be easily done by changing the subscription with a few clicks.

3. Continuity and redundancy – Since the cloud platforms are global, redundancy of data becomes easy and access to resources is not affected due to calamity in a particular region.

Platform as a service (PaaS)

PaaS is a cloud computing service that provides an on-demand environment for developing, testing, delivering and managing software applications. Basically, it provides a platform where software development can be done just like a local machine, with the internal infrastructure abstracted from the developer.

PaaS makes it easier for developers to rapidly code web/mobile applications, without the hassle of setup and management of the infrastructure. 

Serverless computing

Using Serverless computing, the cloud provider handles the setup, scalability and server resources. Serverless architectures are event-driven, allocating or deallocating resources only when an event is triggered.

Software as a service (SaaS)

 

SaaS is delivering software applications on the cloud on demand. With SaaS, cloud providers host the software, manage the infrastructure beneath the software and handle maintenance tasks, upgrades and security.

Integration of Cloud Computing with Web Applications

Benefits of using cloud computing:

1. Cost – Cloud computing eliminates the capital expense of buying hardware and setup of servers and data centers. Sure, the cloud services are available on a payment basis, but issues like scalability are handled with a few additional clicks, instead of buying up equipment and hiring skilled IT experts for maintenance.

2. Speed – Due to the on-demand nature of cloud platforms, vast amounts of computing resources can be allocated with just a few additional clicks, giving businesses a lot of flexibility.

3. Global Scale – Right amount, right place, right time – Literally !!

4. Productivity – On-site data centers typically require hardware setup, software patching, and other taxing IT management chores. Cloud computing removes the need for many of these tasks, so IT teams can spend time on achieving more important business goals.

5. Performance – The cloud platforms, due to their distributed nature, augment low network latency to the end user and also allows for data localisation, hence improving the performance.

6. Reliability – Cloud computing makes data backup, disaster recovery easier due to multiple redundancy in servers distributed throughout the world.

7. Security – Cloud platforms offer a wide range of policies, technologies and controls helping protect your data from security threats.

Some of the popular Cloud computing platforms are:

1. AWS

Integration of Cloud Computing with Web Applications

AWS computing service 

1. AWS EC2 – It is your typical IaaS provided by AWS. It provides computing power on demand. It will reduce your need to forecast traffic as spikes in popularity can be easily handled with a few clicks.

2. AWS Lambda – It is an event-driven, serverless computing platform provided by AWS. It runs code in response to events and automatically manages the computing resources. Very useful for e-commerce businesses to trigger extra computing resources based on specific events aimed at increasing sales and website traffic, like Big Billion days or black friday sales.

File Storage

  1. Amazon S3 
  2. Amazon EBS

Database

  1. DynamoDB
  2. RDS

Some of the companies which use Amazon AWS are:

  1. Netflix
  2. Intuit
  3. Coinbase
  4. Johnson & Johnson
  5. Capital One
  6. Adobe
  7. Airbnb etc.

2. Azure

Integration of Cloud Computing with Web Applications

Some of the companies using Microsoft Azure are:

  • Pixar
  • Apple iCloud
  • Xerox
  • Samsung
  • Boeing
  • eBay
  • Diebold
  • 3M
  • NBC
  • Aston Martin
  • BMW
  • Dell
  • Fujitsu etc.

 

  • Google Cloud Platform

Integration of Cloud Computing with Web Applications

What is Google Cloud Platform (GCP)? | GCP Services | Edureka

Integration of Cloud Computing with Web Applications

 

Some companies using Google Cloud Platform(GCP) are:

  • Spotify
  • Philips
  • Evernote
  • Coca-Cola
  • Motorola
  • HTC
  • Heathrov

Also Read: Green Computing And Environmental Benefits