Cloud computing is an epoch-making innovation in the IT industry. I will justify that in later articles. The goal of cloud computing is to offer IT as a service.
Cloud computing offers 3 main services
- Iaas – Infrastructure as a service
- Paas – Platform as a service
- Saas – Software as a service
The way in which public and organization users consume IT services is changing because of cloud computing. Computing and IT services are now embracing the utility model. Here are few of my thoughts about cloud computing.
Pay as you go
As I already mentioned that companies in cloud computing field are embracing the utility model. The key change in billing is that people pay for the resources that they use and for how long the resources have been used rather than fixed price. Just like turning off lights at night can save money on your energy bill, turning off applications on cloud platform when not needed can save you money. Many cloud providers don’t charge you if you website is stopped or not visited by anyone. You basically pay for the hours of cpu usage, amount of memory usage and amount of incoming and outgoing data.
Scale as you grow
This is the biggest benefit in cloud computing. There is no need to make any upfront investments for hardware. You can start your IT operations with minimum tier of configuration on a cloud computing platform and scale it as your business grows. The availability of new hardware to scale within short frame of time is the best feature. You can increase the CPUs, Memory Size and Bandwidth in just a matter of minutes on cloud platform.
Geo-Replication
If you wish to do business in multiple countries and need IT services locally in each country then cloud computing is the answer. Major players in cloud computing have data centers in almost all the continents. You can replicate your software on these geographically distributed data centers. I call this the democratization of data center.
Services
There are lot of management services like backup, restore that are automated and available to the users in cloud computing by default. Security is one such area. Cloud computing providers constantly test their servers, software and monitor activities for safe guarding their clients assets.
I will add more details to Cloud Computing in the following posts. In the next post I will set the historical context of how this model evolved from a similar era in the past.
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