What is Cloud Computing ?
You might have heard this word many times but do you know what is this Cloud Computing and why it is being heard so much these days. As we know that computer network technologies have progressed a lot in the last 20 years.
Ever since the Internet (the most popular computer network) has revealed its existence, there has been a lot of advancement in the field of computer networks and especially a lot of research has been done in the field of technologies like Distributed Computing and Cloud Computing.
The concept of both these technical terms Distributed Computing and Cloud Computing is almost the same, there are just some differences between the two. So if you want to understand about Cloud Computing then you must also understand Distributed Computing.
Global Industry Analyst says that this global cloud computing service market will become a business of up to $327 billion by 2020. Almost all companies today are using Cloud Computing service, either directly or indirectly.
If we talk as an example, whenever we use the services of Amazon or Google, we are storing all our data in the cloud. If you use Twitter, then you are indirectly using cloud computing service.
Distributed Computing and Cloud Computing both are so popular because we needed better computing networks so that our data can be processed faster. So today we will know completely about what is Cloud Computing? In this article.
So what are you waiting for, let’s get started and know what is this Cloud Computing? And why is it becoming so popular.
What is Cloud?
Talking about the cloud, it is a design of a large interconnected network of servers which is made to deliver computer resources. And there is no concept of exact location in it, where the data is coming from and where it is going.
If I say in simple language, if a user uses it, then he will feel that he is using a huge formless computing power in which the user can do everything according to his need, from his email to mapping of mobile applications.
In the language of business, there is nothing like saying “The Cloud”. Cloud Computing is a collection of licensed services which are provided by different vendors.
Cloud Service replaces technology management and technology acquisition with different products and these products are managed from some other place and one thing is that it remains active only when it is needed.
What is Cloud Computing?
If someone provides a service through the Internet, it is called Cloud Computing. This service can be anything like Off Site Storage or computing resources.
Or in other words, Cloud Computing is a style of computing in which massively scalable and flexible IT-related capabilities are provided as a service with the help of Internet Technologies.
Facilities like infrastructure, platform, application and storage space are available in these services. In this, users use the services according to their needs and pay for the services they use. For this, they do not need to build their own infrastructure.
Nowadays there is a lot of competition in the world and in such a situation people want service on the Internet all the time, that too without any delay. If any application freezes ever, then a lot of dissatisfaction is seen among the people. People want the service they need 24/7.
To fulfill these requirements, we cannot put pressure on the old mainframe computing, so to solve this problem, people used cloud distributed computing technology. Due to which big businesses started doing all their work very easily.
For example, Facebook has 757 million active users who view about 2 million photos daily, about 3 billion photos are uploaded every month, 1 million websites use Facebook and do 50 million operations per second.
In such a situation, traditional computing system cannot solve these problems, rather we need something better that can do this work. Therefore, to do such computing, Cloud Distributed Computing is the need of the hour.
Examples of Cloud Computing
YouTube is a great example of cloud storage which hosts video files of millions of users.
Picasa and Flickr which host digital photographs of millions of users in their servers.
Google Docs which is another great example of cloud computing allows users to upload their presentations, word documents and spreadsheets to their data servers. Along with this, it also gives the option to edit and publish those documents.
Characteristics and Benefits of Cloud Computing
If seen, Cloud Computing has many attractive benefits which are going to be very useful for businesses and people. There are 5 main benefits of cloud computing:
Self-service provisioning: End users can do any work according to their requirement, which they need the most. Due to this, the traditional need of IT administrators, who used to manage and provision your compute resources, is no longer needed.
Elasticity: Companies can grow and earn according to their computing needs. The advantage of this is that earlier there was a lot of investment on local infrastructure, but now it has completely stopped, companies benefit a lot from this.
Pay per use: Compute resources are measured at the granular level. So that users have to pay only for those resources and workloads which they use.
Workload resilience: Cloud service providers often use redundant resources to provide resilient storage and to keep important work going for users who are located in multi global regions.
Migration Flexibility: Organizations can transfer some workloads from one cloud platform to another as per their requirement, that too without any hassle and automatically, which also saves money.
History of Cloud computing
If we talk about cloud computing, then it was born in the decade of 1960. When the computer industry accepted computing as a service and utility based on its potential benefits. But earlier computing lacked both connectivity and bandwidth, due to which it was not possible to implement computing as a utility.
This was not possible until the availability of Internet bandwidth on a large scale by 1990. After which it became possible to think of cloud computing as a service.
In 1990, Salesforce was the first to successfully implement enterprise SaaS commercially. This was followed by AWS in 2002, which provided many services such as online storage, machine learning, computation.
Today, there are many small and big providers like Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, which in collaboration with AWS are providing cloud-based services to other individuals, small businesses and global enterprises.
Cloud Computing vs. Distributed Computing
1) Goals
If I talk about Distributed Computing, then it provides collaborative resource sharing by connecting with other users and resources.
Distributed Computing always tries to provide administrative scalability (number of registration in the domain), size scalability (number of processes and users), and geographical scalability (maximum distance between the nodes in the distributed system).
If I talk about Cloud Computing, it believes in delivering service in an on-demand environment so that the targeted goal is achieved.
If someone provides a service through the Internet, it is called Cloud Computing. This service can be anything like Off Site Storage or computing resources.
Or in other words, Cloud Computing is a style of computing in which massively scalable and flexible IT-related capabilities are provided as a service with the help of Internet Technologies.
Facilities like infrastructure, platform, application and storage space are available in these services. In this, users use the services according to their needs and pay for the services they use. For this, they do not need to build their own infrastructure.
Nowadays there is a lot of competition in the world and in such a situation people want service on the Internet all the time, that too without any delay. If any application freezes ever, then a lot of dissatisfaction is seen among the people. People want the service they need 24/7.
To fulfill these requirements, we cannot put pressure on the old mainframe computing, so to solve this problem, people used cloud distributed computing technology. Due to which big businesses started doing all their work very easily.
For example, Facebook has 757 million active users who view about 2 million photos daily, about 3 billion photos are uploaded every month, 1 million websites use Facebook and do 50 million operations per second.
In such a situation, traditional computing system cannot solve these problems, rather we need something better that can do this work. Therefore, to do such computing, Cloud Distributed Computing is the need of the hour.
Examples of Cloud Computing
YouTube is a great example of cloud storage which hosts video files of millions of users.
Picasa and Flickr which host digital photographs of millions of users in their servers.
Google Docs which is another great example of cloud computing allows users to upload their presentations, word documents and spreadsheets to their data servers. Along with this, it also gives the option to edit and publish those documents.
History of Cloud computing
If we talk about cloud computing , then it was born in the decade of 1960. When the computer industry accepted computing as a service and utility based on its potential benefits. But earlier computing lacked both connectivity and bandwidth, due to which it was not possible to implement computing as a utility.
This was not possible until the availability of Internet bandwidth on a large scale by 1990. After which it became possible to think of cloud computing as a service.
In 1990, Salesforce was the first to successfully implement enterprise SaaS commercially. This was followed by AWS in 2002, which provided many services such as online storage, machine learning, computation.
Today, there are many small and big providers like Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, which in collaboration with AWS are providing cloud-based services to other individuals, small businesses and global enterprises.
2) Types
Distributed Computing is divided into three types
Distributed Information Systems
The main purpose of these systems is to distribute information across various communication models of different servers such as RMI and RPC.
Distributed Pervasive Systems
These systems are mainly composed of embedded computer devices such as portable ECG monitors, wireless cameras, PDA’s and mobile devices. These systems can be identified by their instability in comparison to a traditional distributed system.
Distributed Computing Systems
In these types of systems, computers that are connected in a network communicate with each other through messages to track their actions.
Cloud Computing is divided into four types
- Private Cloud
This is a cloud infrastructure that dedicatedly hosts all the applications of a particular IT organization, so that it has complete control over the data, due to which the chances of security breach are negligible. - Public Cloud
This type of cloud infrastructure is hosted by other service providers and is later made public. In such a cloud, users have no control nor can they see the infrastructure.
For example, both Google and Microsoft own their own cloud infrastructure and later give access to the public.
- Community Cloud
This is a multi-tenant cloud infrastructure in which the cloud is shared among other IT organizations. - Hybrid Cloud
This is a combination of 2 or more different types of clouds (Private, Public and Community) only then a Hybrid cloud infrastructure is formed where each cloud remains a single entity but all the clouds combine to form multiple deployment models which are beneficial.
3) Characteristics
In Distributed Computing, tasks are distributed among different computers so that computational functions can be performed at the same time.
With the help of Remote Method Invocations, on-demand network model is used in Cloud Computing Systems which provides access to shared pool of computing resources.
Types of Cloud Computing | Types of Cloud Computing
Cloud computing can be divided into three main parts: IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.
Cloud Computing Models
1) Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
These are self-service models that are used for monitoring, accessing, and managing the infrastructure from a remote location.
Examples – Servers, Firewalls, Routers, CDN
2) Platform as a service (PaaS)
It provides a line of self-service modules for software developers to manage the computing infrastructure from centralized IT operations.
Examples – Email services: Gmail, Outlook.com
3) Software as a service (SaaS)
SaaS accesses the web to deliver applications that are managed by third-party vendors and whose user interface can be accessed only from the client side.
Application Building: Google App Engine, SAP Hana, Cloud Foundry
Cloud Computing has changed the entire computing industry. It has completely changed the look of businesses and IT infrastructure as well. It provides many benefits for hardware and software which seemed impossible a few years ago.
Now a virtual machine needs only a few minutes to run. Cloud Computing has changed the outlook of companies and businesses. It has now become everyone’s first choice because if someone does business with proper planning, strategy and right budget, then he will definitely get success.
And scientists are doing more and more research to make it even better.
Note – The main funda of Cloud Computing is that “You can access any of your data from any corner of the world” for example G-Mail, Google Drive etc.
What did you learn today
I hope that I have given you complete information about what is cloud computing and I hope you have understood about Cloud Computing.
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