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- Cloud computing is basically
the leveraging of pools of computing resources
to minimize costs and maximize compute efficiency.
Here's why cloud computing
is such a game-changer in business.
In the past, hosting applications and data
at an enterprise level meant renting
or building data center space
to house the millions of dollars worth of hardware
and software assets you needed to buy.
Now we have affordable and powerful on-demand options
in the form of cloud computing platforms.
Cloud platforms provide the ability
to leverage remote systems on-demand over the open internet,
the ability to pay for only the resources that you use,
and the ability to scale up and scale back as needed.
Cloud computing might seem new,
but it's really an evolution of two rising technologies,
timesharing and distributed computing.
Timesharing allows users
to share computing resources of a large system,
and distributed computing decentralizes computing resources
and shares the workload among many computers
across a network, which could be in the same room
or in a completely different location.
Let's take a closer look
at the details of what cloud computing is.
Cloud computing has the following characteristics.
It's on-demand and self-service.
Use it when you need it, and you can launch the resources
from an admin portal or script.
It has ubiquitous network access,
so you can connect to it via the internet.
It utilizes resource pooling,
so your computing, storage, and other infrastructure
are used and released when you're done, for others to use.
It features rapid elasticity,
so you can quickly scale up or scale down.
And it's a pay-per-use,
which means you aren't going to pay for a data center
full of unneeded, under-utilized computing power.
Cloud comes in five deployment models.
Private cloud, public cloud,
community cloud, multi-cloud, and hybrid cloud.
And finally, delivery models.
There are three main ones,
Software as a service, or SaaS,
platform as a service, or PaaS,
and infrastructure as a service, or IaaS.
Ultimately, the biggest advantage of cloud computing
is that it allows you to only pay for
the resources that you need when you need them.
There is no need to purchase
hardware and software well ahead of demand.
Cloud allows you to deal with demand elastically,
meaning you can scale the resources up and down
according to need.
Just as importantly, you only pay for the resources you use.
So where are all the developments
in cloud computing leading us?
For one, they're leading us to establishment
of cloud computing as a common practice in technology.
This means that cloud computing has become pervasive to IT,
and it is really another tool in the shed.
The developments also are leading us
to emergence of new cloud capabilities,
such as machine learning and big data analytics.
And one last place they're leading
is to the mass migration of applications and data
to cloud-based platforms.
As a result, we'll see a lot of projects based on that goal.
Ultimately, the promise that cloud computing delivers on
is flexibility.
It can dynamically scale up or down
to meet your organization's computer hardware,
software, and cost demands.
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