Introduction To Cloud Computing

When it comes to Cloud computing, few people always seem skeptical about its applications and usage. Today the worldwide public cloud computing market continues to grow and is expected to reach an estimated 397 billion U.S dollars in 2022.

1. What is meant by Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources such as storage, processing power, etc. Over the Internet with a pay-as-you-go pricing model.

To make it simple, let us understand it with an example. Suppose you have a startup idea and you have good faith in it. So you plan to execute it now, and you decide to buy all the infrastructure as per your business needs. There are two ways in which your business can go either it fails miserably, or it booms and grows exponentially.

If it fails, then all the investment you did in your infrastructure would be misspent.

But if it grows, then you need to add more resources to your existing infra i.e. you need more computing power and storage. Today businesses are thriving and dwindling every minute, and if you have minutes of downtime, that means a loss for your business.

So that's where the Cloud computing vendors like AWS, Azure, GCP, and Salesforce come in. Vendors like AWS, Azure, and GCP provide you with their infrastructure that you can use as per your need, and you have to pay only for the resources you use.

2. History of Cloud Computing

In 1999, Salesforce became the first company to offer applications to enterprises over the internet. Soon in 2002, Amazon started Amazon Web Services that were providing storage and computation.

Publicly launched on March 19, 2006, AWS offered Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Enabling people to rent a virtual computer and use them.

Today, AWS has more than 200 fully-featured cloud services for a variety of technologies and industries. AWS ranks as one of the most popular public cloud infrastructure and platform services running applications worldwide in 2020, ahead of Azure and Google cloud services. AWS is one of the hefty revenue segments for Amazon that generated 45 billion U.S dollars in 2020 net sales.

3. Types of Cloud Computing services

The list of available cloud computing services is vast, but most fall into Saas, Iaas, Paas, Faas.

What is Software-as-a-Service (Saas)?

This type of public cloud computing service delivers applications over the internet through the web browser. The most admired Saas applications for business are Google G Suite and Microsoft Office 365. Here the underlying hardware and OS are irrelevant to the users, and the only thing they need to focus on is using the software.

What is Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas)?

Iaas is the service that provides you with resources for all your business infrastructure needs. Public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP offer highly scalable databases, storage, and virtual private network. This is attractive to companies that want to build applications from very scratch and want to control nearly all the resources themselves.

Amazon Web Services was the pioneer of IaaS provider and is still the leader, followed by Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and IBM Cloud.

What is Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)?

Platform-as-a-Service provides a set of services that specifically target developers. PaaS is the next layer up as well as the underlying storage, networking, and virtual servers; it includes tools and software that developers need to build applications.

Here the developer or organization doesn't need to be worried about the whole infrastructure and only needs to focus on developing codes or testing them. The deployment will be taken care of through services; like AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Heroku, and Google App Engine.

4. Cloud Deployment Model

There are mainly three types of cloud environments, also known as cloud deployment models. Businesses or individuals can choose to run applications on public, private, or hybrid clouds depending on their requirement

Public Cloud

In the Public cloud computing model, users can access a large pool of computing power over the internet. It provides a shared platform that is accessible to the clients or the general public. Also, public clouds are cost-effective.

AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM's Blue Cloud, Sun Cloud, and Google Cloud are examples of the public cloud.

Private Cloud

This deployment model is also known as the internal cloud. It provides computing services within the organization behind the corporate firewall; companies can control exactly where their data is being held and can build the infrastructure in the way they want.

If a company has sensitive data, it can use a private cloud for its database purpose, as it provides a high level of security.

Hybrid Cloud

A hybrid cloud is the unification of a private cloud with a public cloud. Hybrid cloud involves creating a parallel environment for the public and private cloud.

In the Hybrid cloud, conscientious activities are performed by the public cloud. and pivotal activities are performed by the private cloud.

Conclusion

Cloud Computing has provided many solutions which are useful for organizations as well as individuals. It helps by providing solutions for businesses at the bare minimum cost possible.

Learning Cloud computing tech such as AWS would open a door for massive opportunity as we are already using cloud computing services for various use cases, and it's likely to grow more in the near future.