A glimpse of Cloud Computing — 1 ☁️

As everyone knows that cloud computing became a buzz word. This blog post will explain the nitty-gritty of cloud computing and the acronyms involved in cloud computing.

What is Cloud?

Cloud is a metaphor of the internet. So the term cloud computing is referred to as Internet-based computing.

As of now, there is no proper definition of cloud computing, But, I will provide a working definition of cloud computing.

Cloud Computing: Providing computer system resources like storage and computing power to users without their direct management, through the internet.

Basically in cloud computing, the user doesn’t need to download to access data. The user can access the data through the internet by using the services provided by cloud providers. So, the user is accessing some other’s computer(server) for accessing the data.

Categories of Cloud:

Private Cloud: Private Clouds are only accessible to privileged customers. Example: private organizations and private businesses.

Public Cloud: Public clouds can be accessible by any person as far as they pay and use.

Hybrid Cloud: It contains the properties of both public and private cloud.

Modes of Cloud Computing Services:

1. Haas — Hardware as a service — In Haas, the barebone hardware machines will be given to customers to do whatever they want.
2. Iaas — Infrastructure as a service — In Iaas, the infrastructure such as the storage, networking, virtualization will be given to customers. Ex: Google Compute Engine.
3. Paas — Platform as a service — In Paas, the platform will be given to the customer to develop applications and also to run and execute them without bothering about infrastructure. Ex: Google App Engine.
4. Saas — Software as a service — In Saas, the services such as Gmail, Google docs these services will be run without bothering about the platform or infrastructure.

The primary difference in “as a service” models

Racks — The group of servers in the data centre is known as Rack. The data centre can have as many racks as possible.

As more users started accessing servers more servers are added to the network and the complexity of achieving tasks was increased. This is where virtualization comes in.

Virtualization: Virtualization is the process of running a virtual instance of a computer system in a layer abstracted from the actual hardware. Virtualization relies on software to simulate hardware functionality and create a virtual computer system.