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What is Cloud Computing?
Ever wondered how to run a complex
application like Solidworks or test out Adobe After Effects prior to investing
in the recommended hardware for them? You might’ve even considered investing in
a full-blown Gaming PC and do all the work/play in it at some point of time.
All these involve a higher amount of capital and at least some amount of
experience in handling PC or Software components. But what if I told you that
you could do all these from just a Chromebook? Work on a complex 3D Modelling
software or edit 4K videos or even play the latest triple-A games at the best
possible resolutions with just a fast internet connection. This is Cloud
Computing.
Cloud Computing is a service offered by
many high-profile to even mid-tier companies that delivers on-demand computing
services. These services range from an application server to storage and game
stream. They hold enough processing power to run all your applications or to
cover all your needs and for a monthly/yearly payment or on a pay-as-you-go
system you can avail yourself of all the processing power 24x7.
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The Cloud Computing services are divided
into three major categories:
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
Platform as a Service (PaaS) and
Software as a Service (SaaS)
What’s in it for you?
Some of the examples for these type of
services includes Microsoft Office online, all of the cloud storage solutions
(Google Drive, Dropbox, Mega etc.), the Appstream2 tech by Amazon Web Services
which lets users host applications online and grant the access to selected IPs
and many more.
When users opt-in for Cloud Computing,
they have the power to scale up their performance as their need increases. If
you fill-up the storage in your Google account, you can increase it at
subsequent rates by paying a small fee. Also, if your business requires you to
put up a demo of your product for the customers to access and experience,
opting for multi-tenancy services from reputed service providers helps in just
the right ways.
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It lets many customers share the same
architecture or the application but within their secluded environment. This
ensures privacy and data protection while letting numerous clients use a single
machine/software.
Advantages of moving to the cloud:
Many businesses have already moved to
cloud infrastructures for different use cases like data backup, software
development, testing, analytics etc. This is mainly because of the following
set of advantages:
The Freedom to Choose: The cloud gives you
easy access to a broad range of technologies to quickly spin up resources as
you need them–from infrastructure services, such as compute, storage, and
databases, to the Internet of Things, machine learning, data lakes and
analytics, and much more. One can easily execute instances in a matter of
minutes and get the work executed at a faster pace. This gives the freedom to
experiment, test new ideas to differentiate customer experiences and transform the
business.
The Ability to Scale: The foremost
advantage is that we do not have to incur all the heavy capital requirements to
set up the server in the initial stages itself. We can start with a basic plan
and work our way up from there as and when our need increases.
Budget-Friendly: Adopting a cloud solution
also saves us the costs for the setup and its maintenance allowing us only to
pay for the services that we consume on a pay-as-we-use basis.
Dive to International Waters: Not
literally, but in the sense that we can have our app or service running in
servers located in other countries which helps in achieving reduced latency and
acquire global customers. This also enhances their user experience by a greater
margin and also gives us redundancy.
These points are just the tip of the iceberg and if we start looking at the actual savings and compare the service providers, we can get benefited by a greater margin. According to a research article published in IJCSMC, “Cloud Computing is also called as the fifth generation of computing after Mainframe, Personal Computer, Client-Server Computing, and the Web.”
This blogpost just covers the basics and to get an actual and in-depth idea on cloud computing, we’d recommend you give a look at the official websites of AWS and Azure linked below:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/
We will also make sure to get back with another blog that focuses on the detailed implementation and the effect that cloud computing has on our lives.
References:
https://ijcsmc.com/docs/papers/May2013/V2I52013116.pdf
https://aws.amazon.com/what-is-cloud-computing/
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/overview/what-is-cloud-computing/
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