What is Cloud computing, Types of Cloud, Cloud Computing Architecture

Cloud computing is all about renting computing services. A lot of people are under the impression that it is more to do with storage, but this is incorrect. The idea was first floated in the 1950s. Today's cloud computing is supported by five technologies & they are virtualization, service orientation, web 2.0, utility computing, distributed system & its peripherals.

What is Cloud Computing?

In a simple way, cloud computing can be explained as the Internet based computing which is used to store & access the data & programs on remote servers hosted on the internet rather than using a computer's hard drive or local server.

Cloud computing gives services to people worldwide. Assume you have a computer & you do all your normal work like storing files, playing games, etc. Now, you wish to play high-end games or you want to use certain software's which are not installed in your computers and for using those Softwares you have to pay a certain sum of money separately, in that event you are left with two options. Either you buy a powerful computer or make a new set up. The best solution is to take a computer on rent, if you have access to high-speed internet. Ask the service provider to do your stuffs & you will use the power of that computer.

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Cloud computing offers various services & applications. Assuming 1000 employees are working in a company. For the purpose of maintaining these 1000 employee's data, the company will need a dedicated unit leading to an increase in expenditure. By approaching a cloud service provider & spending a small amount monthly the company can get the job done. The best part about cloud computing is that one can easily scale up or scale down the services. It's a win-win situation for both the users & providers.

Cloud Computing Architecture

When we carefully observe the Cloud computing architecture, we will realize that it incorporates both components & sub-components necessary for cloud computing. These components are mentioned below :

• Cloud-based delivery & a network ( Internet, Intranet, Intercloud).
• Back end platforms ( storage, servers ).
• Front end ( fat client, thin client ).

What are the Different Types of Cloud

There are as many as four different types of cloud viz public cloud, private cloud, community cloud & hybrid cloud. It is worth mentioning, that since cloud computing is an internet-based computing, therefore, a shared pool of resources are available over a broad network access. These resources can be released with minimum efforts & service provider interaction.

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History and Evolution of Cloud Computing

Distributed System

A distributed system enables the sharing of resources and letting them use it in an effective manner. It offers great merits in the form of scalability, continuous availability, heterogeneity & concurrency. It is a combination of different independent systems however, all of them are presented as a single entity to the users. As discussed above the Distributed system offers plenty of facilities, but despite those facilities, it has a major drawback & that is the fact that all the systems must be present in the same geographical locations. To overcome this problem three more types of computing were introduced & they are Mainframe computing, Cluster computing & Grid computing.

Mainframe Computing

Mainframes are extremely powerful & reliable. Although they were launched in 1951, but they are still considered beneficial for bulk processing tasks e.g. online transactions. For massive input-output operations, these are extremely significant. For handling a large volume of data mainframes are very handy. These systems have almost no downtime with high fault tolerance. These were very expensive, so cluster computing was used to negate the cost factor.

Clustering Computing

In the 1980s Clustering computing was introduced as an alternative to Mainframe computing. In clustering computing, every machine was connected to each other by means of a network with a high bandwidth. These were equally competent as far as high computations are concerned & these were fairly cheap as well. As & when required, the provision of adding new nodes to the cluster also exists in clustering computing. Although the cost factor was brought down by using Clustering computing, but the problems of geographical restriction were still not addressed therefore, Grid computing was introduced.

Grid Computing

It provided great flexibility, as different systems could be placed in different locations & were connected by the internet. Grid computing came into existence in the 1990s. These systems belonged to different organizations, so the grid composed of heterogeneous nodes. It was noticed that Grid computing got rid of some major issues experienced earlier with other systems of computing, but it raised a new issue that was regarding the increase of distance between nodes. Low availability of high bandwidth connectivity as well as other network-related issues were observed with this system therefore, Cloud computing came into play & is also called as " Successor of Grid Computing.

Virtualization

It is regarded as the base on which some major cloud computing services operate. It was introduced around 40 years back. It can be described as a process that creates a virtual layer over the hardware enabling the user to run multiple instances at the same time on the hardware. Virtualization is considered as an important technology for Cloud computing. One of the most common types of virtualization is Hardware virtualization.

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is an interface by which the cloud computing services interact with the clients. It offers dynamic web pages. Web 2.0 adds flexibility among web pages. It must be mentioned out here that social media has been made possible by this technology. Facebook, Twitter, etc are examples of Web 2.0.

Service Orientation

Service orientation basically acts as a reference model for cloud computing. It provides aid to low cost & evolvable applications. This computing model introduced two key concepts. Quality of Service ( QoS )  which included Service Level Agreement & Software as a service (SaaS).

Utility Computing

Utility computing can be explained as service provisioning techniques for services like compute services, storage, infrastructure etc based on a pay-per-use model.

So we can say that the above-mentioned technologies have contributed immensely in shaping up cloud computing.

Conclusion 

The above article reflects the significance of Cloud Computing & how useful it is for us as well the areas where it can be put to good use. Various technologies have helped Cloud computing to become effective. Cloud computing offers various services extremely beneficial to a lot of users. This comprehensive post will surely help the readers to get an insight into cloud computing.

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