WHAT IS CLOUD COMPUTING?
Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources via the internet, with pay-as-you-go pricing. Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centers and servers we can access technology services, such as computing power, storage, and databases, on a needed basis from cloud providers. Organizations of every type, size, and industry are using the cloud for a wide variety of uses cases, such as data backup, disaster recovery, email, virtual desktops, software development, and testing, big data analytics, and customer-facing web applications.
For example, financial services companies are using the cloud to power real-time fraud detection and prevention.
You don’t need to make large upfront investments in hardware and overpay for capacity you don’t use. Instead, you can trade capital expenses for variable expenses. And you only pay for IT and consumes it.
History Of Cloud Computing
The evolution of cloud computing can be bifurcated into three basic phases:
1. The Idea Phase
This phase incepted in the early 1960s with the emergence of utility and grid computing and lasted till pre-internet bubble era. Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider was the founder of cloud computing.
2. The Pre-cloud Phase
The pre-cloud phase originated in 1999 and extended to 2006. In this phase the internet as the mechanism to provide Application as Service.
3. The Cloud Phase
The much talked about real cloud phase started in the year 2007 with the classification of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS got formalized. The history of cloud computing has witnessed some very interesting breakthroughs launched by some of the leading computer/web organizations of the world.
DELIVERY MODELS OF CLOUD COMPUTING
Cloud computing offers different services models based on three delivery models. They follow the order as:
- Saas
- Paas
- Iaas
What is Saas?
Saas or Software as a service is a service that offers on-demand pay per use of application software to users. Unlike licensed bought programs. This service is platform-independent and you don’t need to install the software on the PC. Cloud runs a single instance of the software and makes it available for multiple end-users. It is managed by the vendors. The end customer is the user of the Saas.
Example: the Google ecosystem such as Gmail, Google Docs, and Google drive.
What is Paas?
Platform as a service is a that mainly a development environment and is made up of a programming language execution environment, an operating system a web server, and a database. All of this is encapsulate the environment where the user can build, compile, and run their program without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. Developers are the users of the PaaS.
Example: Amazon web service, Google apps engine, etc.
What is Iaas?
Infrastructure as a service that is it offers all computing resources but in a virtual environment so that multiple users can access them. Resources include Data Storage, Virtualization, Servers, and Networking. SysAdmin mainly uses Iaas.
Example: Amazon EC2, GoGrid, etc.