What exactly is cloud computing ?
Tags: cloud, devops, aws, azure
Published: 2022-10-16 18:48:32

**"Cloud computing is a computer in the sky." What? How is that possible?**

When I first heard the name " Cloud Computing", a lot of questions sprang up in my mind. The first time we hear about the name, we get confused, so let's talk about what cloud computing is. By the time you finish reading this article, I hope you would've gotten a clear idea about this topic.

Anna is a person who runs a shopping store in a town, and she went shopping to collect the resources she needed to host her online shopping application. She went to the computer store and got the CPU, monitor, network cables, and UPC, and she had to spend a lot of money on that computer hardware. She came to her shopping store and set up all the hardware components and hosted her online e-commerce application through the internet.

Anna's web application was hosted on the internet for her customers, and her business grew steadily. When the new year came, Anna offered a 25% to 50% discount for all the items on her website. As a result, customers went into a shopping frenzy and began to shop and browse on her website. This resulted in a lot of traffic, and the application crashed due to the server and other hardware being unable to handle the load.

To handle this amount of network traffic, Anna must upgrade to On-Premise Computing, which requires her to purchase another server. However, once the season is over, Anna no longer needs the extra server to handle network traffic on her application. So, what is the solution to her problem?

## What exactly is On-Premise Computing?

Honestly, it's really simple. Anna used on-premise computing to host her application. On-premise computing includes servers, databases, software applications, networking cables, and secure handling. Basically, we configure all the infrastructure locally in our building or office in "On-Premise Computing."

## Why cloud computing?

On-premise computing in Anna's scenario means that Anna has to pay a lot of money to obtain the servers and other infrastructure.

When we face a situation like Anna's, at peak times, we cannot handle the network traffic on the application. To solve this problem, Anna has to purchase another server. But when the peak time is gone and the web traffic becomes normal, the additional server is useless, but she has already paid for the server.

Simple on-premise is not easy with scalability. We have to pay for the setup, and once we scale up, it is difficult to scale down. There are also heavy losses in terms of infrastructure and maintenance costs.

On-Premise Computing needs a lot of space for the servers, and those servers need power continuously. They also need to be maintained.

The most important part is security. As a company, we have to protect our data security, but on-premise computing systems offer less data security and a complicated combination of physical and traditional IT security measures. If we lose the data, it's hard to recover it from an on-premise system. We need a team to manage hardware and software.

In the past, those were the main issues that companies faced with on-premise computing systems. So this is where Cloud Computing saves the day.

## Cloud Computing

Companies can have their own data centers or computing infrastructure. If not, companies can rent these computer resources and infrastructure from the cloud service providers through the internet. We call this "cloud computing."

In On-Premise Computing, we have limited capacity in certain locations. In that capacity, we provide services like VMs or containers. Applications can be run on VMs and containers.

When we consider cloud computing, it's not that different from on-premise computing. In the cloud, there is a huge amount of capacity. There are actual physical data centers in different locations. They can be different buildings, cities, or countries. In the data centers, there are clusters of servers and racks with various nodes that actually run a particular workload.

_**" Cloud computing" is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing.**_

Imagine we manage our files and services on our local system. We can do it over the internet in a cost-efficient manner.
Simply, we can use IT resources over the internet, servers, networking, storage, development tools, applications, etc. The good part is that we have to pay only for the resources that we use. We can rent IT resources through the cloud provider when we need them.

## Benefits of Cloud Computing

In Anna's scenario, we get the idea about why we need cloud computing then let's talk about that,

**Scalability** -  Scalability is one of the main benefits of cloud computing. When there is too much traffic on our application, we can schedule additional resources to be deployed to the server. We can scale up or down our server in seconds, and we only pay for the resources that we use.

**Cost** - cloud computing has a cost. Pay-as-you-go pricing means we pay only for what we need and when we use it.

**Speed** - We do not have to spend a lot of time setting up our servers and configuring the infrastructure. In cloud computing, we can set up our servers and all the infrastructure in a few minutes with just a few mouse clicks.

**Reliability** - If there is a data loss, cloud computing systems have robust disaster recovery measures in place to ensure faster and easier data recovery. Reliability means when we access an online application, the application must be up and running, and it must be accessible at any time and any location. When we use the application, there will be no interruptions or downtime, and our connections must be secure.

**Availability** - High availability is one of the best benefits of cloud computing. High availability means our products, and services are available for our customers at any time, anywhere, and using any device across the internet.

**Cloud availability is related to cloud reliability.**

Security - Cloud computing offers better security and lets you avoid having to constantly monitor and manage security protocols

Moving to cloud computing is a better way to run your business with less cost.