CLOUD COMPUTING
If you are an IT professional or a computer science graduate the chances are you already have heard about the term cloud computing. No worries even if you don’t because I’ll give you a brief introduction about this trending topic among the IT industry. Before describing cloud computing I want to explain what a traditional data center contains. Suppose you are planning to build a software application for your business chances are you have your own on-premise data center with your own dedicated server which serves up your application. Now the problem with this data center of your own is you need to completely manage it by yourself. If the customer base for your application increases you need to buy more resources which need more capital investment. If your data center fails due to any reason, there is no backup, and this results in application downtime which may lead to huge revenue loss. Keeping these problems in mind many businesses are moving their infrastructure to cloud for providing better services to their customers.
After discussing the cons of having your own data center let me introduce the pros of cloud computing. Cloud computing is basically a set of servers that are continuously connected to the internet which are managed by a cloud service provider. Some examples of cloud service providers are
So, what are the advantages of hosting your application on cloud? The cloud resources can be managed from anywhere on the earth with an Internet connection. The cloud models these days provide pay-as-you-go model which means we just pay for the computing resources that are only used. This means you don’t have to pay for the services you never used.
The software updates that are needed are also provisioned by the service provider. The cloud model provides features like auto-scaling, geo-replication. If the customer base of your business increases the servers that are additionally needed are automatically added and they can be removed if they are not in use and the entire process is managed by the service provider. Geo-replication allows your data to be hosted at different locations which increases the service uptime even if one data center fails.
The cloud computing also provides three types of services. They are
- IaaS (Infrastructure as a service)
- PaaS (Platform as a service)
- SaaS (Software as a service)
The users will have the option to choose any of the above based on their business model.
Through IaaS the client gets virtual machines, virtual storage, virtual infrastructure and other hardware assets to manage. The service provider manages all infrastructure while the client is responsible for the aspects of deployment. This includes OS, applications.
PaaS provides virtual machines, Operating Systems, applications, services, development frameworks. The client has the ability to deploy and develop applications on the cloud infrastructure or use the applications that were programmed using languages and tools that are developed by the PaaS service provider.
SaaS is a complete operating environment with applications, management, and the user interface. In this model, the client is provided with the application and his roles end with interaction with the software provided. Everything else down to the infrastructure is the vendor’s responsibility.
So based on the business model its easy to choose any one service. As the user data increases day by day its better to use cloud technologies which provide greater flexibility in managing resources.
