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Simplifying the concept of Cloud Computing
Cloud Computing as a very general and broad term used in the technology industry for anything delivering hosted services over the Internet.
Cloud Computing is a commercial extension of computing resources like computation cycles and storage offered as a metered service similar to a physical public utility like electricity, water, natural gas, or telephone network. It enables a computing system to acquire or release computing resources on demand in a manner such that the loss of any one component of the system will not cause total system failure. Cloud computing also allows the deployment of software applications into an environment running the necessary technology stack for the purposes of development, staging, or production of a software application. It does all this in a way that minimizes the necessary interaction with the underlying layers of the technology stack.
More compactly stated, cloud computing is a commercial extension of utility computing that enables scalable, elastic, highly available deployment of software applications while minimizing the level of detailed interaction with the underlying technology stack itself.
Characteristics normally include being on demand, elastic and fully managed which enables providing the user the ability for having as much service as needed without worry about infrastructure, support or mai
ntenance.
Services provided by the cloud are usually split into three areas –
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), this is usually a service providing virtual servers and storage on demand. Customer can pay for what they use and it becomes like a utility. Amazon Web Services is a great example and leader in this space with EC2 which has a per hour pricing model.
Platform as a Service (PaaS) is usually a set of development tools and software that is run on servers in the cloud. Examples of PaaS providers include Force.com, Azure and Google App Engine.
Software as Service (SaaS) provides the software on demand without the need to host your own platform or web server infrastructure on premise. More and more businesses are moving to the cloud with CRM/ERP applications. Salesforce.com is a leader in this space with over 10 years experience in the industry with its SaaS business model others have adopted.
AMAZON EC2/CLOUD COMPUTING SERVICES
Amazon Web Services (AWS) delivers a set of services that together form a reliable, scalable, and economical computing platform 'In the cloud'.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) , a central part of Amazon’s cloud computing platform is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud.EC2 allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications and pay for the actual resources consumed like on the basis of data transfer or instance-hours hence the term "elastic".
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is an online storage service that enables you to upload download and store data in the cloud. The data can be downloaded and then used with other services.
Features of Amazon Services
- Elastic Block store : This feature facilitates block level storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances
- Autoscaling : This feature allows user to scale their Amazon EC2 capacity according to conditions defined. It can be used along with the elastic load balancer or without it to help adapting computing capacity to site traffic.
- Elastic IP Addresses : Elastic IP addresses are static IP addresses that can be used for dynamic cloud computing.
- Amazon Virtual Private Cloud(Amazon VPC): Amazon VPC is a secure and seamless bridge between a company's existing IT infrastructure and the AWS cloud.
- Amazon Cloudwatch : This feature enables real-time monitoring to Amazon's EC2 customers on their resource utilization such as CPU,disk and network.
Cloud Computing Cost Estimation
