Brief Introduction to Cloud Computing

What is Cloud Computing?

One may ask the meaning of Cloud Computing.

The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST),defines Cloud Computing as a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

Simply put, Cloud Computing is making use of storage, software, databases, servers, analytics, intelligence and networking resources over the internet.

Virtualization

Cloud Computing is possible today because of the concept of virtualization. This means dividing computer hardware resources into separate logical environments, where each environment has its own resource such as memory, processing power and storage.

Cloud Service Providers

As Cloud Computing is using a shared pool of resources. These resource providers are called Cloud Service Providers. They are the ones who set up, manage and make available the compute, network, storage, database resources needed to run businesses. They make use of either Software as a Service model(SaaS), Platform as a Service model(Paas), or Infrastructure as a Service model(IaaS) to render services to businesses and other consumers.

Examples of Cloud service providers include Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud, Salesforce.

Why Cloud Computing?

Cloud Computing has several enticing characteristics that makes it preferable over traditional hosting on a local server.

I explain them as follows:

1. Cost efficiency:

This is because you only pay for exactly what you use as against the cost of setting up the physical resources and maintaining them over the years regardless of how much of those resources are actually being utilized. With resource pooling, consumers save on costs as they use a shared model.

2. Scalability:

In Cloud Computing, you can provision or deprovision your required resources from the cloud providers in proportion to your workload at a given time. This is called Scaling.

3. Elasticity:

This is the ability of the cloud resources to scale dynamically(consistently adjusting to the provisioning and deprovisioning of resources.

4. Agility:

This is the ability of the cloud to respond quickly to provisioning and deprovisioning of resources. This is unlike the traditional method of computing where it can take days, weeks or months to get a system to be up and running after provisioning or deprovisioning resources.

5. Fault Tolerance and High Reliability:

The architecture of the cloud makes it such that system breakdowns, outages and natural disasters that would significantly impact traditional computing, does not impact businesses on the cloud. Cloud services are always available

6. Reduced time to deploy resources:

Start up capital is significantly reduced in the cloud. Much time is also saved in employing already available cloud solutions in a business.

7 High Availability:

The Cloud is able to keep services running for very long periods without having a downtime. This is also due to its architecture.