What is Cloud Computing?

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What is Cloud Computing? 

 

I am sure you much have heard tons of time about Cloud Computing and as few among us might be even aware of aware of this term as well. And one must not be surprised by that as this term had blown up the internet industry and everyone in past decade or so has been taking about it even if they know about it or not. 

 

So, what exactly is cloud computing?  

 

Well to understand that we have to understand how do internet work. 

 

How internet works 

Well internet is nothing but millions and millions of systems connected with each other and sharing data among themself. So, where do we need cloud computing in this. Internet is controller/ managed by multiple data centers and each data centers use to have numerous machines/ hardware. And anyone who need to consume the resource available in these data center need to pay for a complete machine up till a few decades ago, even though you need the complete machine compute power or not one was forced to pay for that much. So, say I have a need of one server with 2 Core CPU and may be 8 GB RAM and 500 GB hard-disk, and if the server size does not fit in my threshold, I would end up paying for a higher server configuration which I would not really need. 

 

And hence to solve this problem of paying more than what a business need by paying only for the server configuration which is required by my business the concept of cloud computing came into existence. But does cloud computing solve this problem. 

 

Concept of Cloud Computing 

What cloud computing is doing to solve this problem of unused resource is that it shares the hardware the unused hardware among other users. That means the cloud service providers (there are a numerous of them available in the market with various types of services as their offerings) use to have machines with very huge configuration and shares the space with multiple users based on the need and in that case, you pay only for the resources you consume and not the complete hardware.  


Let’s try to understand this with an example. It’s the same concept like renting a house/ piece of land from a landlord, i.e., let say there is a landlord who have 2000 square feet of land where he wants to rent the land, but he is not getting any tenant to rent the complete 2000 square feet so he splits the land into smaller portions as per the tenants need say he splits the land into 3 sections of 700, 600, 700 square feet sections. And hence he can rent the land to 3 different tenants where he has lot of options available.  


The example above shows the option of how the resources are shared among the users. But this is not only how cloud computing is helping business i.e., by paying only for the resource you need as oppose to paying for the complete bigger hardware. But it also allows you to pay only for the time you need the resource and save on the cost for your business. To give an example let say your business expects huge customer volume/ footfall on your website on a special event like Christmas and hence you would like to ensure smoot customer experience by upgrading to a bigger hardware. But because you have enrolled for a smaller hardware as per your regular need for the business it's challenging to upgrade the hardware on an on-demand basis using traditional ways of hosting applications. But with cloud computing the hardware can be upgraded or even downgraded on an on-demand basis as per our business needs. Which as per Cloud Computing terms is called as scaling up or scaling down the services. So, using cloud computing we can scale-up the service during Christmas and when the event is over, we will scale-down the service to our regular size and hence we will pay only for a higher configuration during the time we need and rest of the time we pay for a smaller configuration of hardware. Indeed, these days the cloud service providers have been providing various automated mechanism to scale-up or down as an example if the CPU consumption of the services exceeds a specific threshold say 90% the system will be automatically scaled-up to a bigger configuration and vice-versa as well i.e., if the CPU consumption is less than 30% the system will be scaled-down to a lower configuration to say on cost. 

 

Because of the cost saving features and ease of option to scale-up or down on an on-demand basis business are looking towards cloud computing in big time. 

 

Conclusion 

We spoke about traditional ways of hosting application and how cloud computing is changing the traditional ways of hosting applications and helping business big time. 

  

Hope you liked the post, do provide your inputs in the comments section, also if you think the article will be helpful for any of your friends and relatives then please do share the article with them.  

   

And don't forget to subscribe for the new post available so that you get notified on your mailbox.  

   

Happy Learning. 📚  

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