An introduction to Cloud Computing

What is Cloud Computing?

The delivery of computing resources via the internet is known as cloud computing. It provides cost savings, scalability, high performance, economies of scale, and other advantages. Many businesses associate cloud migration with data and IT modernization.

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing resources over the internet, such as storage, processing power, databases, networking, analytics, artificial intelligence, and software applications (the cloud).

Companies can access the computational assets they require when they need them by outsourcing these resources, eliminating the need to purchase and maintain a physical, on-premise IT infrastructure.

Characteristics of Cloud Computing

Organizations used to buy and maintain an on-premise IT infrastructure before cloud computing. Although initial cloud adoption was mostly driven by cost reductions, many businesses now discover that public, private, or hybrid cloud infrastructure offers a variety of advantages.

The characteristics that define cloud computing are listed below.

On-demand self-service

Cloud computing providers provide APIs through which users can request new resources or scale existing resources as needed. Teams can use infrastructure as code tools like Terraform and Ansible to easily automate infrastructure provisioning.

Broad network access

The location of physical hardware is a major consideration for providing the best end-user experience. By offering physically scattered across the globe, cloud computing offers a major benefit by enabling businesses to strategically provide hardware that is location-targeted.

Resource pooling

A cloud infrastructure platform’s computing resources are dynamically divided and allocated on demand. Because physical machines on a cloud host are dynamically provisioned and shared among multiple tenants, cloud hardware is thoroughly optimized for maximum utilization.

Rapid elasticity

Cloud infrastructures can dynamically grow and shrink, allowing users to request that their computational resources auto-scale in response to traffic demands.

Elasticity can occur on a per-machine basis, where a resource allocation grows to maximize available machine resources, or on a multi-machine basis, where an application automatically scales to multi-networked machines.

Measured service

Cloud infrastructure providers provide detailed usage metrics that are used to communicate usage costs. Amazon Web Services (AWS), for example, provides usage for each service category as hourly or daily line items.

Cloud service providers typically use a pay-as-you-go billing model that is measured and delivered, so customers are charged for the exact amount of computing resources used.

Cloud Computing services

Infrastructure as a service

Infrastructure as a service is a fundamental cloud service layer that enables organizations to rent IT infrastructure from a cloud provider, such as servers, storage, networks, and operating systems.

Moreover, IaaS allows users to book pre-configured machines for specialized tasks such as load balancers, databases, email servers, and distributed queues.

Platform as a service

An IaaS-based cloud infrastructure called platform as a service offers resources for creating user-level tools and apps. It offers the supporting infrastructure, which consists of computing, networking, and storage resources, as well as middleware, development tools, and database management systems.

Customers of PaaS can therefore easily upload an artifact of their application code, which is then instantly deployed to the PaaS’s infrastructure.

Software as a service

Software as a service (SaaS) is a method of delivering software applications over the internet on-demand and usually via subscription. The application is hosted and managed by the cloud providers, who also handle software upgrades and security patching as needed.

Function as a service

A cloud computing service that provides a platform for customers to develop, run, and manage applications is known as function as a service.

This eliminates the need for developers to construct and maintain the infrastructure required to create and launch an app. Cloud providers provide cloud resources, run a block of code, return the result, and then destroy the used resources.

Cloud computing makes advanced computing resources available on-demand, with regular updates, and without the need to purchase and maintain an on-premise infrastructure.

Teams become more efficient and reduce time to market with cloud computing because they can rapidly acquire and scale services without the significant effort required to manage traditional on-premise infrastructure.

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