Every business bigger than one person needs somewhere to store its data and run its business applications and communications, including email. Cloud computing is, providing the means through which everything — from computing power to computing infrastructure, applications, business processes to personal collaboration — can be delivered to you as a service wherever and whenever you need.
The “cloud” in cloud computing can be defined as the set of hardware, networks, storage, services, and interfaces that combine to deliver aspects of computing as a service. With cloud computing, you rent capacity in a provider`s data centre, and connect over the internet. The provider install, maintain and upgrade hardware and software as required. Typically you`ll rent a service, such as data storage or email or accounting, rather than `a server` as such, and pay $X per user or $Y per business per month.
The following diagrams outlines ways in which cloud computing can be utilized for an application.
In diagram one, both data and application have been hosted in the cloud, the second option is to host our application in the cloud and our data locally, and the third option is to host our data in the cloud and our application locally.
The expense model is very different. In our local network, we have to buy the hardware and software licenses, install and configure the servers, and finally, we have to maintain them. All this counts in addition to building and maintaining the application! In cloud computing, the host usually handles all the installation, configuration, and maintenance of the servers, allowing us to focus mostly on the application.The direct costs of running our application in the cloud are only for each machine-hour of use and storage utilization.
The individual pieces of cloud computing have all been around for some time. Shared mainframes and supercomputers have for a long time billed the end users based on that user`s resource consumption. Space for websites can be rented on a monthly basis. Providers offer specialized application hosting and, relatively recently, leased virtual machines have also become available. If there is anything revolutionary about cloud computing, then it is its ability to combine all the best features of these different components into a single affordable service offering.
