Cloud Computing Essentials

Since the last decade, people are talking of Cloud Computing. What is a big fuss about Cloud computing. How did the Cloud come in to existence? Well the existence of cloud computing is all started way back in 1990s in the form of Virtual Private Network, provided by Telecom companies. offered primarily dedicated point-to-point data circuits, began offering virtual private network (VPN) services with comparable quality of service, but at a lower cost. By switching traffic as they saw fit to balance server use, they could use overall network bandwidth more effectively. They began to use the cloud symbol to denote the demarcation point between what the provider was responsible for and what users were responsible for. Cloud computing extends this boundary to cover servers as well as the network infrastructure.

Amazon started building its Cloud product in the early 2000 to give elastic computing feature to most of the companies in the world. By doing so most companies started taking advantage of this and started using cloud. What are the advantages of Cloud?
Cloud computing is a shared services of converged infrastructure which is available over the network. Cloud provides the feature to share the resource to achieve scalability and provides the ability to pay charges only for the services available. The companies who are buying cloud services need not invest huge investment to set up big infrastructure. The companies can opt for cloud services and can use the services on demand. Lets discuss about the of Cloud.

Public Cloud.
A public cloud comes under the cloud computing model, in which a service provider makes resources, such as applications and storage, available to the general public over the Internet. Public cloud services may be free or offered on a pay-per-usage model.

The cloud services will be available in different geographical locations mainly bifurcated based on the continents. It helps to divert the traffic of users based on the countries under each continent. By relocating servers in different continents, the traffic is optimized and the efficiency of the website is well maintained and maximum throughput is consistently maintained.


Private Cloud
Many big corporate will customize their own requirement and form their own Cloud computing which is accessible only to their employees. That means, the public viewers will not be able to enter the private cloud of any company. The Private Cloud will be behind the firewall and the access to the servers in Cloud will be highly restricted. Only those users who has the credentials and privileges will be able to enter the private cloud. Top Security features will be implemented in the private cloud. Only big corporate can afford to host their own private Cloud. Companies like Infosys and Wipro has its own private cloud. They don’t depend on any Cloud providers.

Hybrid Cloud
Hybrid cloud is a combination of one Public cloud and at-least one private cloud. The communication channel between the public and private cloud are established. The application host on the private cloud server will be able to communicate to the applications that are hosted on the public cloud servers.
To give some scenarios, a cloud computing environment in which an organization provides and manages some resources in-house and others resources are provided externally. In terms of real world usage, A company might use Amazon Cloud’s Simple Storage Services to store huge data archival and continue to use their own private cloud for running applications and other database services.


IaaS, PaaS and SaaS


Cloud has many types of products. They are
1. Infrastructure as a Service
2. Platform as a Service
3. Software as a Service.
The Cloud Service providers provides all the above services and charge whatever we use. Let us know what the above services is all about.

Platform as a Service
Platform as a Service (PaaS) is the most complex of the three. It is also called as cloud platform services deliver computational resources through a platform. The developers gain with PaaS is a framework they can build upon to develop or customize applications.
The following are the features of using PaaS
• development, testing, and deployment of applications
• quick, simple, and cost-effective,
• eliminating the need to buy the underlying layers of hardware and software.
With PaaS, vendors still manage runtime, middleware, O/S, virtualization, servers, storage, and networking, but users manage applications and data. PaaS provides the computing infrastructure, the hardware, and the platforms that are installed on top of the hardware. Similar to the way that you might create macros in Excel, PaaS allows you to create applications using software components that are controlled by a third-party vendor. PaaS is highly scalable , and users don’t have to worry about platform upgrades or having their site go down during maintenance. Users who benefit most from PaaS include companies who want to increase the effectiveness and interactivity of a large staff. For the needs of larger companies and independent software vendors, Apprenda is one provider of a private PaaS for .Net business-application development and deployment.

Software as a Service
Software as a Service [SaaS] uses the web model to deliver the Enterprise software application which is hosted on the cloud. The corporate or the individuals will pay a subscription to use the SaaS. The end user need not worry about installation of the software. Most SaaS applications can be run directly from a Web browser, without any downloads or installations required. SaaS eliminates the need to install and run applications on individual computers.




Infrastructure as a Service
Infrastructure as a Service(IaaS) delivers computer infrastructure, storage and networking. The customer who subscribe for IaaS have to pay only for what they use. IaaS provides total flexibility to the end customers by opting to customize their needs for instance, whenever there is a peak time, they can increase the computing infrastructure and scale the performance.


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