What is Cloud Computing

The most simplistic definition of cloud computing is the delivery of on-demand IT services over the internet. The organizations offering these types of services are called Cloud Service Providers of CSPs. The purpose of this article is to help understand the various types of services provided by the CSPs.

Cloud computing, in general, can be categorised into three types – Private, Public & Hybrid.

As the names suggest, Private cloud computing is owned by a individuals or organizations where the resources are not publicly available to people outside the organization. Public cloud computing allows the access to resource publicly which increases the reach of resource to wider crowd. Hybrid in contrast to Private and Public platforms, provides the features of both platforms and tries to act as a bridge between Private and Public computing services.

There is one more category of cloud computing called as Community computing however, this is not much used terminology. As evident from the name, these services are available to a particular community.

All the above-mentioned cloud computing provides various types of services which can be further classified into four types of service models:

On-Premises or Private computing: I had explained earlier that the Private cloud computing is owned by individuals and hence, needs all the management done by individuals.

IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service contains the basic building blocks of the cloud infrastructure. It mostly offers services on top of the hardware such as renting IT infrastructure and networking services. The user pays of the computing services on IaaS because it is the fundamental platform to build new technologies.

PaaS – Platform as a Service supplies on-demand tools for developing, testing, delivering, and managing software applications. It provides a platform to the developers and architects to create applications that are scalable without worrying about the underlying IT infrastructure of servers, operating systems, storage, database, security as these are managed by the CSPs.

SaaS – Software as a Service is a method of delivering the on-demand applications over the internet on a subscription basis. The CSP takes care of managing the infrastructure, platforms and applications. The applications are delivered over the internet mostly over a web browser. These are also available on multiple devices which can be accessed anywhere.

FaaS – Function as a Service is another layer of service to PaaS which enables the developers to isolate the code from everything. FaaS works on the concept of serverless model where the software or applications does not use any resource of the server until the application is triggered. These applications are triggered by events and uses the resources only while the application is executing.

The below example gives a simple example to understand the concepts. Let’s consider a simple car as service:

I hope this explains the basic concepts of various types of cloud computing.