What is cloud computing ?
A cloud services provider, often known as a CSP, manages a remote data center where applications, servers (both physical and virtual), data storage, development tools, networking capabilities, and other computing resources are hosted. Cloud computing is the on-demand internet access to these resources. These materials are made available by the CSP in exchange for a monthly subscription fee or usage-based charges.
Depending on the cloud services you choose and in comparison to conventional on-premises IT, cloud computing aids in the following:
Reduced IT costs: By using the cloud, you may offload some or all of the costs and work associated with building, installing, configuring, and administering your own on-premises infrastructure.
Enhance responsiveness and time-to-value: Instead of waiting weeks or months for IT to reply to a request, buy and setup supplementary gear, and install software, your firm may begin using enterprise apps in the cloud in only a few minutes. Cloud also enables you to give some users—more especially, developers and data scientists—free access to software and infrastructure assistance.
Scale more easily and affordably: Cloud offers elasticity, allowing you to scale capacity up and down in response to spikes and dips in demand rather than purchasing extra capacity that sits idle during slack periods.
The technology that makes clouds function is often referred to as "cloud computing." This comprises some type of virtualized IT infrastructure, such as servers, operating systems, networking, and other infrastructure that has been abstracted using specialized software to allow pooling and dividing without regard to physical hardware boundaries. One hardware server, for instance, could be split up into several virtual servers.
Cloud service companies can utilize the full potential of their data center resources thanks to virtualization. It should come as no surprise that many businesses have chosen the cloud delivery model for their on-premises infrastructure in order to get the most out of it, save money over traditional IT infrastructure, and provide the same level of self-service and agility to their customers.
You almost probably use some type of cloud computing every day if you use a computer or mobile device at home or at work, whether it's a cloud application like Google Gmail or Salesforce, streaming video like Netflix, or cloud file storage like Dropbox. Recently, market researcher Gartner predicted that global end-user public cloud spending would surpass USD 600 billion in 2023.
Cloud computing services
The three most popular kinds of cloud services are IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service), PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service), and SaaS (Software-as-a-Service), and it's not unusual for a company to use all three.
Software as a Service (SaaS)
SaaS—also known as cloud-based software or cloud applications—is application software that’s hosted in the cloud, and that users access via a web browser, a dedicated desktop client, or an API that integrates with a desktop or mobile operating system. Users of SaaS often pay a monthly or yearly membership fee, while some may provide "pay-as-you-go" pricing depending on actual usage.
SaaS provides the following in addition to the advantages of cloud computing in terms of cost reductions, time to value, and scalability.
Automatic upgrades: SaaS allows users to get new features as soon as the provider makes them available, eliminating the need to plan an on-premises upgrade.
Protection from data loss: Users don't lose data if their device crashes or malfunctions because SaaS maintains application data in the cloud alongside the application.
There are hundreds of thousands of SaaS solutions available, ranging from the most specialized industry and departmental apps to sophisticated enterprise software databases and AI (artificial intelligence) software. SaaS is the main distribution strategy for the majority of commercial software today.
Platform-as-a-Service, or PaaS
PaaS offers software developers an on-demand platform for managing, running, and developing applications without the expense, complexity, and rigidity of maintaining that platform on-premises. This platform includes hardware, the full software stack, infrastructure, and even development tools.
When using PaaS, the cloud provider hosts everything in their data center, including servers, networks, storage, operating system software, middleware, and databases. To'spin up' the servers and environments they require to execute, build, test, deploy, maintain, update, and grow applications, developers need to choose from a menu.
PaaS is frequently created today on containers, a virtualized compute model distinct from virtual servers. The operating system is virtualized via containers, which enables developers to bundle an application with just the operating system services it need to run on any platform without modification or the use of middleware.
Hat Red Kubernetes, an open source container orchestration tool that automates deployment, scaling, load balancing, and other tasks for container-based applications, and Docker containers are the foundation of Open Shift, a well-known PaaS
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
IaaS offers pay-as-you-go online access to the most basic computer resources, including networking, storage, and physical and virtual servers. With the help of IaaS, end users can scale and downsize resources as needed, eliminating the need for large, upfront capital investments, pointless on-premises or 'owned' infrastructure, and over purchasing resources to account for sporadic spikes in consumption.
IaaS gives consumers the most basic level of control over computing resources in the cloud, in contrast to SaaS and PaaS (and even more recent PaaS computing models like containers and serverless).
When cloud computing first started to gain popularity in the early 2010s, IaaS was the most often used model. Although it continues to be the cloud model for many different types of workloads, SaaS and PaaS usage is expanding far more quickly.
Serverless computing
Serverless computing, also known as serverless, is a cloud computing model that frees developers to devote all of their time and energy to the code and business logic specific to their applications by offloading all backend infrastructure management tasks to the cloud provider, including provisioning, scaling, scheduling, and patching.
Additionally, serverless just executes application code for each request and scales the auxiliary infrastructure up or down automatically based on the volume of requests. Customers never pay for unused capacity when using serverless since they only pay for the resources used while the application is active.
Function-as-a-Service, often known as FaaS, is frequently mistaken for serverless computing when, in reality, it is a subset of serverless. FaaS enables programmers to run sections of application code (referred to as functions) in response to particular events. Physical hardware, virtual machine operating systems, and web server software administration are all provisioned automatically by the cloud service provider in real-time as the code executes and are spun back down once the execution is over. The only thing that is not provisioned automatically is the code. Billing begins when performance begins and concludes when performance ends.
Types of cloud computing
Public Cloud
In a public cloud, a cloud service provider makes computing resources, such as SaaS applications, individual virtual machines (VMs), bare metal computing hardware, full enterprise-grade infrastructures, and development platforms, accessible to users over a public network. These materials may be freely available, or access may be charged for using them in accordance with subscription-based or pay-per-use pricing models.
The public cloud provider often offers high-bandwidth network connectivity to guarantee high performance and quick access to applications and data. It also typically owns, administers, and bears full responsibility for the data centers, hardware, and infrastructure on which its customers' workloads run.
The infrastructure of the cloud provider's data center is shared by all users of the public cloud, which is a multi-tenant environment. These clients can number in the millions on the top public clouds, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud.
Because public cloud services are elastic and easily scalable, they are being used by many businesses to move portions of their computer infrastructure to the cloud. This flexibility allows them to adapt to changing workload demands. Others are drawn by the promise of increased productivity and fewer resources squandered because customers only pay for what they actually use. Others aim to cut costs for on-site infrastructures and hardware.
personal cloud
A private cloud is a cloud environment where a single customer has exclusive access to all cloud infrastructure and computing resources. Private clouds combine the access control, security, and resource customisation of on-premises infrastructure with many of the advantages of cloud computing, such as elasticity, scalability, and ease of service delivery.
Usually, a private cloud is housed in the client's data center on-site. However, a private cloud can also be constructed on rented infrastructure housed in an offsite data center or hosted on the infrastructure of a different cloud provider.
Because private cloud is a simpler way (or the only way) to satisfy regulatory compliance requirements, many businesses prefer it to public cloud.Others choose for private clouds because their workloads involve sensitive information such as financial data, medical records, intellectual property, and personally identifiable information (PII).
An business gives itself the ability to quickly shift workloads to the public cloud or run them in a hybrid cloud environment (see below) whenever they're ready by designing private cloud architecture in accordance with cloud native principles.
Hybrid cloud
The combination of public and private cloud infrastructures is what hybrid cloud refers to. An organization's private cloud services and public clouds are specifically and ideally connected to provide a unified, flexible infrastructure for operating its applications and workloads.
The objective of a hybrid cloud is to create a combination of public and private cloud resources with some level of orchestration between them. This will allow an organization to freely move workloads between the two clouds as needed and to select the best cloud for each application or workload. This makes it possible for the organization to accomplish its technological and business goals more successfully and affordably than it could have done with just public or private cloud.
Hybrid multicloud and many clouds
The use of two or more clouds from two or more separate cloud providers is known as multicloud. Using email SaaS from one vendor and picture editing SaaS from another can create a multicloud setup quickly and easily. However, when businesses discuss employing multiple clouds, they often mean using SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS services from two or more of the top public cloud providers.
The usage of two or more public clouds alongside a private cloud system is known as hybrid multicloud.
Organizations adopt multicloud in order to have access to more innovation, prevent vendor lock-in, and a wider range of services. However, the more clouds you use, the harder it may be to manage your environment because each cloud has its own set of management tools, data transmission speeds, and security procedures. Through a central dashboard, multicloud management tools give development teams access to their projects and deployments across different provider clouds, operations teams to clusters and nodes, and cybersecurity personnel to threats.
Cloud security
Organizations have historically found it difficult to consider cloud services, especially public cloud services, due to security issues. But as a result of demand, on-premises security solutions are gradually losing ground to cloud service providers' security offerings.
In contrast to legacy IT settings, maintaining cloud security necessitates various processes and staff skill sets. The following are some examples of best practices for cloud security:
- Shared security responsibility: In general, the client and cloud provider are each responsible for protecting their respective cloud infrastructure and data, but it's also crucial to clarify data ownership between private and public third parties.
- Data encryption should be used for data while it is in use, transit, and at rest. Customer control over security keys and hardware security modules must be unrestricted.
- Customer and IT teams require complete knowledge of and visibility into network, device, application, and data access. User identity and access management.
- Collaboration in management will result in seamless cloud integrations that are secure and long-lasting. This will be made possible by good communication and transparent, easily understood procedures between IT, operations, and security teams.
- Monitoring for security and compliance: To maintain visibility of all data exchanges between public, private, and hybrid cloud environments, it is first necessary to understand all regulatory compliance standards that are relevant to your industry and to set up active monitoring of all connected systems and cloud-based services.
Cloud use cases
It would seem that there are countless uses for cloud computing given that 25% of businesses intend to shift all of their apps to the cloud within the next year. However, even for businesses not contemplating a complete migration to the cloud, some activities and cloud computing are an ideal IT match.
Since the cloud offers affordable redundancy to protect data against system failures and the physical distance needed to recover data and applications in the event of a local outage or disaster, disaster recovery and business continuity have always been natural fits for the cloud. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is provided by all of the main public cloud service providers.
Cloud computing is used for anything that involves storing and processing massive amounts of data quickly and needs more storage and computing power than the majority of businesses can or want to invest in and implement on-premises. Examples comprise:
- data analytics using big
- The "Internet of Things"
Artificial intelligence, especially applications that use machine learning and deep learning
The cloud provides the on-demand end-user self-service that prevents operations tasks, such starting up development and test servers, from becoming development bottlenecks for development teams using Agile or DevOps (or DevSecOps) to streamline development.
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