Cloud computing is a computer service which makes computer resources such as data storage and subscription based applications readily available to their customers.
It uses the internet for storing and managing data on remote servers that can be accessed via the internet.
What are the differnt types of cloud model services available:
There are 3 cloud model services and they are:
- Public cloud: this cloud service is owned by the hosting provider. It provides resources and services to multiple organizations and users and can be accessed via secure internet connection for example Gmail accounts.
- Private cloud: this cloud service is used by organizations to replace their on premise datacenters. This secure cloud service is internally managed by the organization is only available internally in the organization.
- managing the internal operating services that they provide.
- Hybrid cloud: combines the features of the Public and Private clouds.
What are the different types of cloud services offerings?
There are 3 different types of cloud services and they are :
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): this is a pay-as-you-go IT infrastructure service that allows you to rent servers, virtual machines, data storage,
networks, and operating systems from a cloud provider. - Platform as a Service (PaaS): this Pay-as-you-go service provides an environment for building, testing, and deploying software applications that allows you to focus on the application development and not on managing the underlying environment infrastructure. In this service, the platform management is handled by the cloud provider.
- Software as a Service (SaaS): this subscription based service allows customers to connect and use cloud-based applications via the internet. Examples include email accounts and Office 365.
What are some of the advantages of cloud computing ?
Some of the advantages of cloud computing include the following:
- Reduced implementation cost: historically, setting up a data center in an organization was managed as a capital expenditure (CAPEX) project because of the high upfront costs. But with cloud computing, you can use a pay as you go costing model where you only pay for what you use, this reduces the cost of ownership and allows you to manage your IT services cost as an operational expenditure (OPEX).
- No capital expenditures to scale up: as the organization grows, the Information Technology (IT) department might need to add more computing resources. In this situation, they can easily provision new resources without waiting for an approval from senior management due to the reduced purchasing costs.
- Applications can be quickly provisioned and decommissioned: in situations where the organization needs to provision some resources such as a virtual machine for a short period of time, they can easily do that and decommission it once they are done. Which would have been difficult to do if they were running their own data center because they might have need to buy a new server just for that purpose.