What Is Cloud Computing? | Cloud Computing Fundamentals 

Why Cloud Computing? 

Let’s understand this using an example say you want to host a website and there is no cloud computing right now, and you want to host a website. How would you do that?  

First, you would have to buy a stack of servers. You need servers to host your website on after that you have to keep the peak traffic in mind. Now, what is peak traffic? 

Peak Traffic 

Peak traffic is basically the traffic that comes for a shorter duration. For example, you can expect the most traffic between 6 pm and 10 pm because that is the time when people are the freest.  

So there’s peak traffic and after 10 pm the traffic can decline so when your traffic booms you have to have the servers to manage them. And after 10 pm if the traffic declines these servers that you have deployed to handle your traffic become idle. You have to get a maximum server so that you don’t get any problems when the traffic goes up in a peak. After that, since you have these many servers you have so many servers you have to continuously monitor and maintain them because you don’t want your website to experience downtime. So you have to continuously monitor them and maintain them so that your website is up and running.  

The disadvantage of not Having Cloud Computing 

So the setup that is without cloud computing had some disadvantages. Let’s see what were the disadvantages right so : 

  1. First of all the setup was very expensive because you are buying servers on your own. 
  1. You’re maintaining your servers. 
  1. You’re monitoring them at the same time. 

So these problems could be tedious and they can conflict with their business goals. What I mean by that is if you have someone to handle your servers then you can actually focus on how you can expand your application, but if half of the time you’re worried about whether your website is experiencing any downtime or are you protected with all the latest security patches and everything and then you cannot focus on your security goals. 

We solved it using cloud computing. We were able to solve these problems like this. So first of all our problem was that our setup was very expensive.  

Paying For Cloud Services 

So with cloud computing, it was solved. How? Because now we don’t have to buy servers anymore. We just rent them from the cloud providers and we can rent them not on a monthly basis not on a yearly basis but on an hourly basis. So as long as you want the servers you pay for them and when you’re done with your servers you can terminate them and that’s it you don’t have to pay anymore. 

When you rent servers in the cloud you don’t have to manage them or maintain them anymore so that is the responsibility of the cloud provider who’s providing you with those clouds. So now you can focus on your business goals. You can focus on how to expand your application and other things. so it becomes very tension free when you’re using cloud computing and at the same time, it’s cheap as well. So it’s a win-win situation. 

What is Cloud Computing? 

It is the use of remote servers on the internet to store, manage, and process data rather than doing it on a local server you do it on remote servers. So this is what cloud computing is. You can store your data you can manage your data using databases or you can process your data using by renting a server that has larger processing power. So you can get it faster.  

Cloud Models of Cloud Computing 

Now cloud computing also is further divided into models. So there are two types of models in cloud computing :  

  1. Service models  
  1. Deployment models  

Service Models of Cloud Computing 

So service models basically mean the kind of service that the cloud offers. These services can be divided into further modules. 

Three types of Service Models in Cloud Computing : 

  1. Infrastructure as Service 
  1. Platform as a Service 
  1. Software as a Service 

Infrastructure as Service Model in Cloud Computing 

It is like this you get a server on the cloud. So you choose an operating system and you get that server on the cloud. For example, you want a Linux system on the cloud. So you request your cloud provider for the Linux system and they give you a fresh system to work on. They’ll give you the IP address, they’ll give you the password you can remote desktop into that server, and now that server is fresh you can install anything on that server and you can make that server anything.

For example, you can make that server a web server you can make that server to be a database server. It’s all yours you can do anything with it. 

Platform as Service Model in Cloud Computing 

In comparison to infrastructure service where you are getting access to the operating system and you can do anything with the system. When you are using the platform as a service you don’t get access to the operating system. All you get to access is a user interface.

For example, you want to host a website. So you take a service from AWS or you say I want a platform, I don’t want the whole infrastructure so what they do is they launch a server and they don’t give you the IP address and password to it. so you don’t get access to the operating system.

What they do give you is a button right so you can click on that button which is uploading your website onto it, and that is it you don’t have to install any software. you don’t have to manage the files over there. you don’t have to do anything. You just have to upload your files and those files will be automatically deployed on whatever link that they will give you. You go to that link and your website will be deployed as it is you don’t have to manage the operating system at all. 

Software as Service Model of Cloud Computing 

Software as a service, basically means you don’t get the server you don’t get a user interface you basically just get the software. For example, the Salesforce cloud is the most common example. That you guys might know and for those of you who don’t know Salesforce imagine it like if you launch a server on the cloud you are getting the windows operating system as well. Now as you guys know windows operating system is licensed.

But if you are renting a server on the cloud you are basically using windows as software as a service. Because you have rented the windows operator software. So that the easiest way you can understand it, and you take software as a service rather than taking the whole server as the whole infrastructure as a service, or taking as a platform as a service. 

Deployment Models of Cloud Computing 

 It is about how can you deploy your application so when I say deploy your application how you can upload your application in what ways you can upload your application on the cloud?  

Three types of Deployment Models in Cloud Computing : 

  1. Public Cloud 
  1. Hybrid Cloud 
  1. Private Cloud 

Public Cloud Deployment Model in Cloud Computing 

When you’re sharing your server with a host of different people. For example, if you launch your server on AWS,  you are basically getting a server on the AWS infrastructure. You don’t know whether the server on which your operating system is hosted is also giving the operating system to someone else or not because on one server you might have hundreds of operating systems that are virtualized. 

If you are using a public cloud server your data is not safe but some companies have this policy that the data is confidential. 

Hybrid Cloud Deployment Model of Cloud Computing 

A mixture of both public cloud and private cloud. If you have an application wherein you’re using public cloud and private cloud you term it a hybrid cloud. For example, if you are in a data science company and you want to host a website so hosting a website can be done on the public cloud but you have at the same time you have some confidential data as well.

You don’t want to expose yourself to the internet right you can do that on the public cloud as well but because of companies policies, you can host it on your own servers. This kind of architecture then comes out to be a hybrid cloud architecture. 

Cloud Providers of Cloud Computing 

For using cloud computing you first have to contact a cloud provider. And if you want to choose there are actually hundreds of cloud providers out there.  

List of Some Cloud Providers Companies 

  1. IBM Cloud  
  1. Microsoft Azure  
  1. Google Cloud  
  1. Telemach  
  1. Vmware  
  1. AWS 

“AWS and Microsoft Azure” you talk about are the top two cloud providers in the industry of Cloud Computing. 

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