What is cloud computing?
Recently, I asked this question to group of people & they have given different answers:
Cloud computing is platform which provides free space where we can keep our data securely.example gmail,Dropbox
Cloud provides you software on rent
Cloud is the new type of hosting. Earlier we had shared,dedicated & now cloud hosting
Cloud allows you to rent computer(resources), so you can do work that requires i7 CPU with much slower intel Atom processor.
Are these people correct? this is what cloud computing means? Well…yes & no. Confused?
What is Cloud?
Cloud is different things to different people. The perspectives are very different; depending upon whom you are you asking this question. such as,
-
to consumers/non-technical people: Services like Dropbox,Gmail are cloud computing to them.
-
to developers: Cloud is On Demand,elastic & Pro-rata billed, virtualized resource for running applications. Cloud allows us developers to stay developers & not have to become system administrator.
-
to Sysadmins/DevOps: Cloud is platform that virtulizes the entire IT infrastructure, including servers, storage and networks. A cloud combines these resources into a simple and uniform set of computing resources in the virtual environment. Due to its easy provisioning & elastic nature cloud could be used to solve hard scaling problems like Scaling apps from 1 request/minute to 1,000requests/second & then back to 1 request/minute.This kind of brust-scaling which was really hard to with bare-metal resources. But its much easier wth cloud computing
-
to CIOs/CEO: Cloud is new way using which we can manage IT infrastructural resources as a shared utility, and can dynamically provision these resources efficiently to different business units and projects, without worrying about the underlying hardware differences and limitations
-
to Journalists: Cloud is new Buzz word that everybody keeps is talking about & has a lot of activity, hence lot of articles/editorial needs to written about it.
In My opinion, what is cloud computing according?
To me, when someone says cloud; depending upon the context it could represent any of the following: Cloud can be Application hosting platform(Google App engine, Microsoft Azure), Cloud can be Consumer Internet service like Gmail Dropbox, Cloud can be On-demand virtual machines,Cloud can be way of managing I.T infrastructure(servers,storage, networks etc) & so on…
Hence, I like to think Cloud computing more as marketing term which doesn’t mean much, but at same time its a term that most people across spectrum can understand enough get hint on what it it could it be related to. This marketing term also helps to push latest advances in Virtualization Technology, IT resource managent, Deployment & provisioning tools, Standardization & Inter-_Operability efforts_. so the term might be vague & may have different meaning depending upon the context which it is an useful term explaining all these areas.
So, that how I think about The cloud. what comes to your mind when you think about cloud?