Cloud Computing Services?
The growth of cloud computing has been exponential over the past few years, so what is it? Put simply, cloud computing is a remote virtual pool of on-demand shared resources offering to compute, storage, database and network services that can be rapidly deployed at scale. Now there may be a couple of terms within this definition that are new to you, or not too clear, such as virtual or computer.
Well, these could be servers, networks, storage, computing power, and other infra related services commonly offered and referred to as IaaS (Infrastructure as service).
There are other cloud models as well, like PaaS (Platform as Service) and SaaS (Software as service) which is nothing but Cloud application and very popular for building online products and startups, but let’s focus on IaaS first to understand the benefits provided by Cloud.
Not long ago, in order to host a real-world E-commerce application, you need to buy servers, networks, storage and need to set them up to your requirements like installing the required software and operating system. Most of the companies have their own Data Center where these servers are kept, and there was a high cost involved to keep those data center running.
It was just initial time and cost for setting up the server, but also their utilization was poor; for example, secondary servers are often idle just wasting that precious CPU and memory power. The effect was more evident on big companies which own thousands of servers across multiple data center on the world.
Amazon was one such company, which quickly realize that by using virtualization, they can use the computing power of their infrastructure, and that gives birth to the cloud.
In the cloud, you can spin up a server, database, network very quickly with just some clicks and you will only be charged for whatever you use. So this solves the problem of setup, utilization, and scalability.
