Cloud computing

Cloud computing is a virtualization-based technology that allows us to create, configure, and customize
applications via an internet connection. The cloud technology includes a development platform, hard disk,
software application, and database.

What is Cloud Computing

The term cloud refers to a network or the internet. It is a technology that uses remote servers on the
internet to store, manage, and access data online rather than local drives. The data can be anything such
as files, images, documents, audio, video, and more.

There are the following operations that we can do using cloud computing:

Developing new applications and services

Storage, back up, and recovery of data
Hosting blogs and websites
Delivery of software on demand
Analysis of data
Streaming videos and audios

Why Cloud Computing?

Small as well as large IT companies, follow the traditional methods to provide the IT infrastructure. That
means for any IT company, we need a Server Room that is the basic need of IT companies.

In that server room, there should be a database server, mail server, networking, firewalls, routers, modem,
switches, QPS (Query Per Second means how much queries or load will be handled by the server),
configurable system, high net speed, and the maintenance engineers.

To establish such IT infrastructure, we need to spend lots of money. To overcome all these problems and to
reduce the IT infrastructure cost, Cloud Computing comes into existence.
Characteristics of Cloud Computing

The characteristics of cloud computing are given below:

1) Agility

The cloud works in a distributed computing environment. It shares resources among users and works very
fast.

2) High availability and reliability

The availability of servers is high and more reliable because the chances of infrastructure failure are
minimum.

3) High Scalability

Cloud offers "on-demand" provisioning of resources on a large scale, without having engineers for peak
loads.

4) Multi-Sharing

With the help of cloud computing, multiple users and applications can work more efficiently with cost
reductions by sharing common infrastructure.

5) Device and Location Independence

Cloud computing enables the users to access systems using a web browser regardless of their location or
what device they use e.g. PC, mobile phone, etc. As infrastructure is off-site (typically provided by a third-
party) and accessed via the Internet, users can connect from anywhere.

6) Maintenance

Maintenance of cloud computing applications is easier, since they do not need to be installed on each
user's computer and can be accessed from different places. So, it reduces the cost also.

7) Low Cost

By using cloud computing, the cost will be reduced because to take the services of cloud computing, IT
company need not to set its own infrastructure and pay-as-per usage of resources.

8) Services in the pay-per-use mode

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are provided to the users so that they can access services on the
cloud by using these APIs and pay the charges as per the usage of services.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Cloud Computing

Advantages of Cloud Computing

As we all know that Cloud computing is trending technology. Almost every company switched their services
on the cloud to rise the company growth.

Here, we are going to discuss some important advantages of Cloud Computing-

1) Back-up and restore data

Once the data is stored in the cloud, it is easier to get back-up and restore that data using the cloud.

2) Improved collaboration

Cloud applications improve collaboration by allowing groups of people to quickly and easily share
information in the cloud via shared storage.

3) Excellent accessibility

Cloud allows us to quickly and easily access store information anywhere, anytime in the whole world, using
an internet connection. An internet cloud infrastructure increases organization productivity and efficiency
by ensuring that our data is always accessible.

4) Low maintenance cost

Cloud computing reduces both hardware and software maintenance costs for organizations.

5) Mobility

Cloud computing allows us to easily access all cloud data via mobile.

6) IServices in the pay-per-use model

Cloud computing offers Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to the users for access services on the
cloud and pays the charges as per the usage of service.

7) Unlimited storage capacity

Cloud offers us a huge amount of storing capacity for storing our important data such as documents,
images, audio, video, etc. in one place.

8) Data security

Data security is one of the biggest advantages of cloud computing. Cloud offers many advanced features
related to security and ensures that data is securely stored and handled.
Disadvantages of Cloud Computing

A list of the disadvantage of cloud computing is given below -

1) Internet Connectivity

As you know, in cloud computing, every data (image, audio, video, etc.) is stored on the cloud, and we
access these data through the cloud by using the internet connection. If you do not have good internet
connectivity, you cannot access these data. However, we have no any other way to access data from the
cloud.

2) Vendor lock-in

Vendor lock-in is the biggest disadvantage of cloud computing. Organizations may face problems when
transferring their services from one vendor to another. As different vendors provide different platforms,
that can cause difficulty moving from one cloud to another.

3) Limited Control

As we know, cloud infrastructure is completely owned, managed, and monitored by the service provider, so
the cloud users have less control over the function and execution of services within a cloud infrastructure.

4) Security

Although cloud service providers implement the best security standards to store important information.
But, before adopting cloud technology, you should be aware that you will be sending all your
organization's sensitive information to a third party, i.e., a cloud computing service provider. While sending
the data on the cloud, there may be a chance that your organization's information is hacked by Hackers.

Cloud Computing Architecture

As we know, cloud computing technology is used by both small and large organizations to store the information
in cloud and access it from anywhere at anytime using the internet connection.

Cloud computing architecture is a combination of service-oriented architecture and event-driven architecture.

Cloud computing architecture is divided into the following two parts -

• Front End
• Back End
Front End
The front end is used by the client. It contains client-side
interfaces and applications that are required to access the
cloud computing platforms. The front end includes web
servers (including Chrome, Firefox, internet explorer, etc.),
thin & fat clients, tablets, and mobile devices.

Back End
The back end is used by the service provider. It manages all
the resources that are required to provide cloud computing
services. It includes a huge amount of data storage, security
mechanism, virtual machines, deploying models, servers,
traffic control mechanisms, etc.

Note: Both front end and back end are connected to others through a network, generally using the internet
connection.

Components of Cloud Computing Architecture

There are the following components of cloud computing architecture -

1. Client Infrastructure
Client Infrastructure is a Front end component. It provides GUI (Graphical User Interface) to interact with the
cloud.

2. Application
The application may be any software or platform that a client wants to access.

3. Service
A Cloud Services manages that which type of service you access according to the client’s requirement.

Cloud computing offers the following three type of services:

i. Software as a Service (SaaS) – It is also known as cloud application services. Mostly, SaaS applications run
directly through the web browser means we do not require to download and install these applications. Some
important example of SaaS is given below –

Example: Google Apps, Salesforce Dropbox, Slack, Hubspot, Cisco WebEx.

ii. Platform as a Service (PaaS) – It is also known as cloud platform services. It is quite similar to SaaS, but the
difference is that PaaS provides a platform for software creation, but using SaaS, we can access software over
the internet without the need of any platform.

Example: Windows Azure, Force.com, Magento Commerce Cloud, OpenShift.

iii. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – It is also known as cloud infrastructure services. It is responsible for
managing applications data, middleware, and runtime environments.

Example: Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2, Google Compute Engine (GCE), Cisco Metapod.

4. Runtime Cloud
Runtime Cloud provides the execution and runtime environment to the virtual machines.
5. Storage
Storage is one of the most important components of cloud computing. It provides a huge amount of storage
capacity in the cloud to store and manage data.

6. Infrastructure
It provides services on the host level, application level, and network level. Cloud infrastructure includes
hardware and software components such as servers, storage, network devices, virtualization software, and
other storage resources that are needed to support the cloud computing model.

7. Management
Management is used to manage components such as application, service, runtime cloud, storage, infrastructure,
and other security issues in the backend and establish coordination between them.

8. Security
Security is an in-built back end component of cloud computing. It implements a security mechanism in the back
end.

9. Internet
The Internet is medium through which front end and back end can interact and communicate with each other.

How does cloud computing work

Assume that you are an executive at a very big corporation. Your particular responsibilities include to make sure
that all of your employees have the right hardware and software they need to do their jobs. To buy computers
for everyone is not enough. You also have to purchase software as well as software licenses and then provide
these softwares to your employees as they require. Whenever you hire a new employee, you need to buy more
software or make sure your current software license allows another user. It is so stressful that you have to spend
lots of money.

But, there may be an alternative for executives like you. So, instead of installing a suite of software for each
computer, you just need to load one application. That application will allow the employees to log-in into a Web-
based service which hosts all the programs for the user that is required for his/her job. Remote servers owned by
another company and that will run everything from e-mail to word processing to complex data analysis
programs. It is called cloud computing, and it could change the entire computer industry.

In a cloud computing system, there is a

significant workload shift. Local computers
have no longer to do all the heavy lifting
when it comes to run applications. But cloud
computing can handle that much heavy load
easily and automatically. Hardware and
software demands on the user's side
decrease. The only thing the user's computer
requires to be able to run is the cloud
computing interface software of the system,
which can be as simple as a Web browser and
the cloud's network takes care of the rest.