Cloud Computing: An Overview
In this section, I will try to explain what is cloud computing, how it works, the current cloud computing service providers in the market, applications of cloud computing.
What is Cloud Computing?
In simple words, Cloud Computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources via the internet. Instead of buying, maintaining, and accessing the on-premises servers and data centers one can access technology services such as computing power, databases, and storage services on an as-required basis from a cloud provider such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), IBM Cloud, Alibaba, etc.
One of the main advantages of cloud computing is it enables companies to have a global presence, without having a data center in different locations.
Apart from this one can easily build the machine learning or artificial intelligence capacities in his application without worrying much about the physical infrastructure to be purchased.
How does cloud computing work?
The figure below shows a simplified representation of how cloud computing works:
Let us consider an example where you uploaded a document on Google Drive, without knowledge through this action one is using cloud computing.
How ??
We know that the document uploaded can be accessed via our account on any device such as a laptop, computer, or mobile phone with the internet.
What is happening in the back end is that the document is stored in these data centers and the user is able to access it wirelessly via the internet.
Cloud providers can store these files redundantly in different availability zones or regions in the different continents of the world, therefore enabling high availability and disaster recovery of your data.
I hope with this example the concept of cloud computing becomes clear.
Current cloud computing service providers in the market.
The figure below shows the different cloud computing service providers and their shares in the market.
Applications of Cloud Computing
- Infrastructure as a Service [IaaS]: Cloud computing provides the needed compute, network, and storage resources to consumers on-demand over the internet, and on a pay-as-you-go basis. The advantage of this is that the consumer enjoys high savings in costs in terms of buying and maintaining physical servers/data centers.
- Platform as a Service [PaaS]: For a given application the cloud providers can provide the complete platform (compute, database, network and storage) as a service, this enables the clients to only focus on their code/application without worrying about building and maintaining the platform on-premises. This also helps the client in releasing their applications faster into the market as they do not need to think about the infrastructure needed.
- Hybrid Cloud: It is where the client can connect a company’s on-premises private cloud services and third-party public cloud into a single, flexible infrastructure for running the organization’s applications and workloads.
This enables the client to have the flexibility to deploy applications into their own private or public-facing clouds. - Big-Data Analytics: One of the major drawbacks of Big-Data analytics is the physical hardware needed to run analytics on huge databases, but with cloud computing where the infrastructure is provided as a service the client need not worry about the physical hardware needed, he can perform big-data analytics for his applications and pay only for the resources used.
- Cloud Storage: With cloud computing resources one can store vast amounts of data easily without the need to buy physical storage hardware.
- Disaster Recovery: With data stored redundantly across multiple data centers in multiple regions, data can be recovered even at the loss of a data center.
- Data Backup: Vast amounts of data can be backed up into multiple data centers thus ensuring a high availability for the information. This is very important for data backup.
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