Let’s Get on Cloud
By: Hetvi Purohit
Tags: Cloud Services, Cloud Computing, Cloud

Cloud Computing

In the entire day we come across tons of data whether it is a picture from childhood which we are extremely embarrassed of but won’t give up or a work related document. Piles and piles of data! It is an arduous task to maintain all this data. Adversity fuels innovation. Some techie in some part of the world couldn’t live in this hostile state anymore so he and his friends came up with the revolutionary idea of Cloud Computing. Well I’m a little off on the details pardon me.

So what is Cloud computing ?

It is an on-demand pay as you use service. In simpler words it is the availability of computer system resource, data storage services which are not actively managed by the user. There is a group of network elements providing service and this provider-managed schema forms an amorphous cloud and that is how it got its name. If we elucidate this further it is a service that covers a vast range of options, right from the basics of storage, networking, and processing power through to natural language processing and artificial intelligence. In short any service that doesn’t require you to be physically close to the computer hardware that you are using can now be delivered via the cloud.

Benefits of Cloud

It is a pay as you use service so you have a control over when and how much space you want to buy. You can operate as and when your use abates or increases.

You don’t need to manage the IT personally, the services do it for you.

Collaboration is very easy and feasible.

Categories of Cloud

Cloud computing can be divided into three cloud computing models. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is the rudimentary state. IaaS refers to a fundamental building block of computing that can be rented: physical or virtual servers, storage and networking.

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is the next layer up and the underlying storage, networking, and virtual servers; this will also include the tools and software that developers need to build applications along with that could include middleware, database management, operating systems, and development tools.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is the delivery of applications-as-a-service. It is probably the version of cloud computing that most people are used to on a day-to-day basis. The underlying hardware and operating system is not important to the end user, who will access the service via a web browser or app; it is often bought on a per-seat or per-user basis.

Data Center

A data center is a facility that comprehensively takes care of IT operations and equipment for the purposes of storing, processing, and disseminating data and applications. As they house an organization’s most critical and proprietary assets, data centers are vital to the continuity of daily operations. Cloud computing adoption is one of the best ways to maximize the benefits of a data center and makes it easier to simplify and streamline operations. Virtual computing does concurrent operations at the data center which is a big task thus improving efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Talking of perks, cloud computing does not require a large number of servers and other hardware.

Techniques to perform compute

We now know what cloud is and that it is not limited to data storing. Other services provided by cloud like servers, resources, are the boon for cutting edge technologies here we will discuss how can we use them:

Virtual machine : Virtual machines, or VMs, are software that transcends physical computers. They subsume a virtual processor, memory, storage, and networking resources. Vms host an operating system (OS), and you’re able to install and run software just like a physical computer. Using a remote desktop client, you can operate and control the virtual machine as if you were sitting in front of it.

Containers : They are a virtualized environment for running applications. Like VMs, containers are run on top of a host operating system but unlike VMs, they don’t include an OS for the apps running inside the container. Instead, they bundle the libraries and components needed to run the application and use the existing host OS running the container. For instance, if five containers are running on a server with a specific Linux kernel, all five containers and the apps within them share that same Linux kernel.

Serverless computing : It is a cloud-hosted execution environment that runs your code but undermines the underlying hosting environment. One can create an instance of the service, and add their code; no infrastructure configuration or maintenance is required, or even allowed.

No doubt that there are still many hurdles cloud has to jump over like privacy: how it will guarantee isolation between cloud resources, extreme scalability: efficiently managing a figure like 10 crore servers, programming model: efficiency using a big number of server but one can’t just ignore that fact that is the already the new entranced technology.