Cloud computing for beginners: Some Guidance Regarding its’ functioning in the Digital Era?

• May 20, 2020
• Deeksha Gupta

In today’s technology driven era, using smartphones, tablets and web browsers have become a norm. Be it connecting with people from the comfort of your home, sending and receiving emails within a fraction of a second, tapping online service like drop box or watching “Game of thrones” on Netflix, you have the entire world at your disposal, with these gadgets around. Have you wondered how? It’s all because of the innovation powerhouse i.e. Cloud computing.

So, what is cloud computing and its’ various aspects? But before we delve into the nitty grittiest of cloud computing, let’s understand how this technology solution has revolutionized the IT ecosystem.

So, if you are new to this technology, it’s important to understand how the industry functioned until cloud computing became mainstream.

For instance, hosting a website, before cloud computing became mainstream, required businesses to:

• Buy a stack of servers
• Buy more servers keeping in view peak traffic
• Monitor and maintain their servers

Now, such a set-up without cloud computing had several shortcomings such as:

• Cost of installing the entire set-up was extremely high.
• Troubleshooting problems was tedious, time consuming and conflicting with your business goals
• Your servers were bootless most of the time as the traffic kept on varying time and again.

However, with the advent of cloud computing, businesses no longer have to deal with these shortcomings.

• Put your data on cloud servers: We don’t need to buy a server anymore, we can rent them from a cloud provider on a monthly/yearly/ hourly or even a minute In other words, you pay as you go as per your requirement and then terminate the deal once you are done.
• Scalability factors: Earlier, you had to scale resources according to the traffic but now you don’t need to maintain multiple servers. You can scale up or scale down the capacity of your server according to theinflux of traffic.
• When you rent the servers on the cloud, you do away with the hassle of managing or maintaining them.

Now, let’s understand what Cloud Computing is:

Cloud computing is the delivery of on-demand computing services over the internet on a pay-as-you-go basis, which means rather than managing files on a local storage device, you can save them over the internet.

Cloud providers companies: Amazon web services, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud and Digital Ocean etc.

Cloud model: There are 2 types of models in the cloud:

• Service models
• Deployment models

Service model:Service model can be categorized as follows: SaaS (Software as a service),PaaS (Platform as a service) and IaaS (Infrastructure as a service)

SaaS (Software as a Service): it is a service that offers on-demand pay per use of applications software to users. Unlike licensed bought programs, it is platform-independent servicewhich doesn’t require you to install the software on your PC. The cloud runs a single instance of the software and makes it available for multiple end-users which makes cloud computing cheap. The services are provided and managed by vendors and hence, you don’t need to maintain anything.

Who use SaaS: End consumers are frequnt user of Saas.

Examples: Products and services of Saas include Google Ecosystem such as Gmail, Google docs Google drive.

Microsoft office 365,HR and Helpdesk solutions and Customer relationship management such as Salesforce.com.

PaaS (Platform as a Service): This service is made up of a programming language execution environment, an operating system, a web server & a database. It allows developers to deploy applications without requiring any infrastructure.In this model, you only need to manage data & the application resources as all the other resources are managed by the vendors.

Who use PaaS: PaaS is mainly used by Developers.

Examples: Products and services of Paas include Google App Engine, Windows Azure ,Heroku and Force.com.

IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service):

This service provides users with basic computer infrastructure capabilities like data storage, servers, and hardware; all of the resources are present in the cloud. IaaS gives businesses a way to large platforms and applications without any need for physical infrastructures

Who use IaaS: IaaS is mainly for sysadmin.

Examples: Products and services of Iaas they include Amazon EC2, GoGrrid and Rackspace.com.

There are three types of deployment model:

1. Public Cloud: The cloud infrastructure is made available to the general public over the internet and is owned by the cloud providers.

Examples: Microsoft Azure, AWS, IBM’s blue cloud etc.

2. Private Cloud: The cloud infrastructure is exclusively operated by a single organization. It can be managed by the organization or a third party and may exist on-premise or off-premise.

              Examples: AWS, VMware etc.

3. Hybrid Cloud:It consists of the functionalities of both public and private clouds.

              Example: Federal agencies opt for private cloud and when sensitive information is involved, they

              use public cloud to share database with general public or other government departments.

Let’s understand all the three deployment models with help of an example:

                                    Source – technoworldpro.com

Let’s take the example of public transport vehicles like Buses, Cars, Taxi etc. which people use to travel from one place to another. So, if users travelling via a bus, users basically pay for the distance and time required to reach their destination. Since, Users are using a shared infrastructure; their expenses will be minimal as it gets divided among all the on boarded passengers. Same applies for the public cloud, users pay for the resource they use and for the time they use it. One thing to understand here is that users can pay as per their need.

On the other hand, Private cloud is like a situation when users buying their own car for commuting purpose. Here, users pay a huge amount upfront.However, if users want the best of both types like the comfort of the own car as save themselves the inconvenience of paying the entire amount  upfront then renting a car would be similar to being in a hybrid environment.

Conclusion

Today, businesses are leveraging innovative technologies, services and platforms to sustain in an ever-evolving and competitive business landscape. A strong cloud environment is a must-have for all organizations as it helps organizations to store all their critical business applications and data in a safe and secure way. Keeping the varied requirements of enterprises in mind, cloud offers a wide range of public, private and hybrid cloud hosting services. Cloud computing is a model that offers computation services through internet and is easy to use. Cloud hosting services make it easy for remote employees to access important information in a secure environment, collaborate over the internet, and communicate with others in real-time.

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