An outline of Cloud computing

Cloud computing enables organizations to obtain flexible, secure, and cost-effective IT infrastructure.

Infrastructure can have virtual servers, databases, storage, messaging etc.

Cloud computing allows us to access servers, storage, databases and other applications over the internet. The two basic characteristics of cloud computing are virtualization and automation. Here, virtual means not physical i.e. CPU, disk, RAM, network cards are virtualized. Therefore, we don’t need to invest a large amount in buying and maintaining expensive hardware. Some of the key players who provide cloud services are

Service Providers - Platforms

AMAZON.COM – AWS (Amazon Web Services)

Microsoft – Azure

Google – Google App Engine

IBM – Blue cloud

Salesforce.com – Force.com

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

            AWS is a cloud computing platform provided by Amazon.com. Here, the web services refer to the cloud services or remote computing services where we can rent virtual computers on Amazon’s own infrastructure. It offers great value proposition. We pay for what we use.

            Dynamically scalable and virtualized resources are provided as a services over the internet. Advantages of going to cloud technology include cost savings, high availability and easy scalability.

Cloud computing provides shared resources on the internet in a scalable and simple way. The major advantage over mainframe is, the cloud computing offers infinite power and capacity.

IaaS

AWS provides a category of cloud services known as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) where it offers virtualized computing resources over the internet. IaaS provides access to networking features, virtual computers or dedicated hardware and data storage space. These virtualized computers come with guaranteed processing power and reserved bandwidth for storage and internet access.

Cloud computing challenges

Performance

Users from long distances may experience high latency and delays

Security and Privacy

Risk of vulnerability to attacks when information and critical IT resources are outside the firewall

Control

Cloud computing providers have a full control of the platforms and there is no platforms specific for companies and their business practices.

Bandwidth costs

Companies can save a lot of bucks on hardware and software; however, they have to incur higher network bandwidth charges particularly for high data intensive applications

Services provided by the AWS

            There are around 60 services provided by AWS where they can be accessed via the AWS management console (a web portal) or programmatically via API (or web services).

Some of the services being used across the industries are,

Compute

Storage

 Database

Network and CDN

Analytics

Application Services

Deployment and Management

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