Let’s Talk About Cloud Computing

Today, cloud technology has conquered the development world. You do not need so much money to successfully start your startup or have serious computing power in a data center. It is enough to have an advising cloud-subscription plan from any cloud computing provider.

Today the leader is Amazon with its cloud-based solution Amazon Web Services (AWS). In this article, I propose to understand what cloud technologies are, see their differences with traditional solutions, consider the key characteristics of cloud computing, consider cloud computing models.

Let's start with the basics

Cloud computing is computing services such as servers, storage, databases, and software computing that are delivered to the end-user by subscription using a third party as the Internet provider. An example of cloud computing can be e-mail, for example, Gmail and Outlook. There can also be social networks such as Facebook, Facebook, Twitter, as well as various storage services such as Dropbox, Google Drive.

Let’s move on to the next concept, Cloud services. These are an IT service that is offered through a Cloud provider.

A Cloud provider is a company that offers Cloud services for organizations and individuals. A consumer is an organization or individual who uses a Cloud service.

The “Pay as you go” or “pay per use” payment model, or pay for what you use, is a payment model in which the consumer pays only for what he uses, very similar to a bill for communication services or the Internet. In such a model, consumers do not pay for infrastructure, maintenance, or the electricity that is consumed by computing power but only for what services you use. For example, in many cloud services that provide disk space, there is a certain storage limit and if the user wants more storage, then he needs to pay extra.

Multi-tenancy is a kind of architecture in which one instance of software runs on a server and serves multiple clients.

“X” as a service — some cloud power that is delivered to clients as a service.

The Major Characteristics of Cloud Computing

If you search any search engine for what cloud computing is, you will find 4 key characteristics. I propose to deal with them in more detail.

1. Cloud Computing On Demand (self-service, on-demand)

This means that the user can use cloud resources as needed, automatically and without human interaction. The user does not need to be physically present in the data center, but just sends a set of commands through a terminal or website.

2. Wide Network Access

This feature is the ability to be accessed over the network using standard mechanisms. It could be the internet pooling resources. This characteristic implies the provision of resources that are pooled and capable of serving multiple users using multi-tenancy.

3. Fast elasticity

This characteristic implies the ability to expand or, conversely, reduce the number and size of services depending on the user’s subscription plan, and the user does not need to take actions to increase the hardware component in the server, for example, if the number of users on your website has increased, then there is no need to buy additional RAM to process requests or buy additional hard drives to grow the database. And vice versa, if it has decreased, you do not need to maintain an expensive and powerful server. You can simply change the server capacity with a couple of clicks.

4. Measured service

This implies that all logs files can be viewed.

Cloud computing delivery models

Cloud computing offers four models:

1. On-premises

This is the oldest build model. It assumes that all equipment is installed by the owner and he owns everything. It is the owner who must carry out the complete management and maintenance of the equipment.

2. IaaS or Infrastructure as a Service

This model assumes that the user does not own the infrastructure and therefore only purchases a subscription to the equipment and does not physically maintain the equipment. A prime example of this approach is the use of Amazon EC2, where the user leases a server running Windows or Linux operating systems, and the user is also required to provide full software maintenance on such a server, right down to the operating system.

3. PaaS or Platform as a Service

This model assumes that the user only manages the applications and data, the rest of the service, such as hardware maintenance, operating system maintenance, and the hypervisor, is taken over by the service provider. An example is AWS Elastic Beanstalk. In this service, the user only uploads the code, he does not care what hardware he will run on, what operating system will run this code, etc.

4. SaaS or Software as a Service

In this model, everything is managed by the provider. The user only concentrates on his business. An example would be apps like Facebook or even Dropbox.

Conclusion

Cloud solutions are the best for startups today. Any startup can start working in the fall in a short time using cloud computing and in the short term, the future of software development belongs to cloud technologies.