Cloud Computing- An Overview

Hi everyone 👋🏻,

In this blog post, I am going to give you an overview of cloud computing. We will look at the examples of cloud computing and the old way of doing things. After that, I will also discuss the service models for cloud computing.

Let's get started

Traditional Computing

It is a computing environment historically used for hosting services, applications, and data that are owned, managed, and controlled by the same organization. In this computing, the user can have access to data only on the system in which data is stored. It is a possess of using physical data centers for storing digital assets and running complete networking systems for daily operations. Now,
What is a data center?
In a layman language, the data center is a building somewhere and in that building, we have routers, switches, firewalls, storage systems, servers, and application delivery controllers. And a data center is not really a cheap thing to build and maintain. For maintaining a data center there must be special air conditioning systems, redundant power supplies, redundant network connectivity, and lots of infrastructures to make sure that your services run 24/7. So there is a lot of headache in maintaining data centers. That's why many companies say goodbye to traditional IT and move to cloud computing. But it doesn't mean it has gone away. It's still used in some companies.

What is Cloud Computing?

"Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centers and servers, you can access technology services, such as computing power, storage, and databases, on an as-needed basis from a cloud provider."

Cloud computing examples

Let's take examples of some services or applications that use cloud services to understand what cloud computing is.

1.) Gmail, Dropbox, Facebook:- These all are examples of cloud storage providers and the number of cloud storage providers is increasing day by day.
Gmail is one of Google’s most important email service providers that provide unlimited storage on the cloud. It is used by billions of people. Gmail is a consumer service as well as it comes as a business package too.
Dropbox is established in 2008 and right now is a true leader in cloud storage. It is a storage service to offers up to 1 TB of storage space for free and allows users to access files on any device through its website.
Facebook is the largest social media platform globally with 2.6 billion monthly active users worldwide. It can store a large amount of information, images, videos on your profile.
2.) Microsoft Office 365:- Microsoft office 365 is cloud-based product access by lots of users through the internet. With the help of Office 365, you can work from anywhere and share the work documents with your colleagues worldwide. There are number of benefits of office 365 like it improves user productivity, provides 1 TB storage with OneDrive. You can easily recover data from the cloud if you lose your computer or it crashes etc.
3.) Dell’s Secure Healthcare Cloud:- Dell is one of the most used cloud service providers in Healthcare. It allows nurses, physicians, and administrators to share information quickly from anywhere and patients can access it remotely without any delay. It ensures patients receive the best possible care without unnecessary delay.
There are many more examples of cloud computing in different areas like in education there is AWS(Amazon web services), SlideRocket, Ratatype. For the government, there are IT consolidation, shared services, citizen services, etc.

Cloud Computing Deployment Models

"A cloud deployment model is defined according to where the infrastructure for the deployment resides and who has control over that infrastructure." There are four deployment models associated with cloud computing:

a.) Public cloud

b.) Private cloud

c.) Hybrid Cloud

d.) Community Cloud

Benefits of Cloud Computing over Traditional IT

Let's discuss some benefits of cloud computing over Traditional IT and understands why companies choose to say goodbye to traditional IT.

	Traditional IT infrastructure	Cloud computing
hardware	organizations will have to acquire a large number of servers, routers, switches, firewalls, storage systems with proper security	All the hardware, networking, storage, and everything is provided by cloud service provider
maintenance	organizations will have to do regular checkups of their hardware and also have to ensure software being used are regularly updated	Regular maintenance of hardware is handled by cloud service providers and they also handle software updates for services managed by service provider
disaster recovery	organizations will have to do necessary backups of data and setup so in case of disaster the users don’t face any downtimes	cloud service providers have a global infrastructure with multiple data centers within one region, so in case of any disaster, services are uninterrupted.
IT staff	a team of trained IT professionals had to be hired to monitor the entire infrastructure	cloud service providers have highly trained IT staff that works 24/7 to ensure best services
flexibility and scaling	to handle increasing workloads, more powerful hardware have to be set up so the user doesn’t feel any lag in services	Cloud hosting offers an enhanced level of flexibility and scalability. Cloud servers can scale up or down depending on the level of traffic your website receives.
automation	most of the processes of scaling up or down, backups, monitoring, etc. are manual and time-consuming	from deploying the infrastructure, monitoring, backups to customers, and taking necessary actions in case of failures, all the things are automated.
running cost	you will need to purchase equipment and additional server space upfront to adapt to business growth	cloud service providers charge for the time resources are used or the amount of storage is being used.

Types of cloud computing services

A lot of different types of cloud services fall under the overall category of cloud computing. The NIST(The National Institute of Standards and Technology) cloud computing definition identifies three cloud service models: software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

SaaS

SaaS(Software as a Service) provides clients with the ability to use software applications on a remote basis via an internet web browser. Examples of SaaS include Google Applications and internet-based email applications like Mail, Hotmail, and Gmail. The most popular among online retailers, allows merchants to run direct sales applications such as shopping carts in the cloud without their customers having to download or install programs to make a purchase.

PaaS

PaaS(Platform as a Service) provides clients with the ability to develop and publish customized applications in a hosted environment via the web. It represents a new model for software development.

IaaS

IaaS(Infrastructure as a Service) allows clients to remotely use IT hardware and resources on a "pay-as-you-go" basis. It is also referred to as HaaS(Hardware as service). Major IaaS players include companies like IBM, Google, and Amazon.

Future of cloud computing

Cloud computing is the future of enterprise applications and solutions. The International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that already in 2018 at least half of IT spending is cloud-based. It has many benefits that it provides to its users and businesses. There are no standards or regulations worldwide that provided data through cloud computing.

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