Cloud Computing 101: A Beginner's Guide

The history of cloud computing can be traced back to a publicly proposed concept facilitated by John McCarthy in 1961. He proposed that if computers he advocates for become computers of the future, computing may someday be organised as a public utility and would be an important and new industry.

However, it was in 2006 that the concept of cloud computing emerged as a commercial term. Amazon launched its Elastic Compute Cloud(EC2) services, which allowed organisations to lease computing capacity and processing power to run their applications.

Cloud computing, as defined by the referenced textbook, is a specialised form of distributed computing that introduces the utilisation of models for remotely provisioning scalable and measured resources.

Why would organisations decide to migrate to the cloud?

Cost reduction is an advantage of cloud computing; there is a direct relationship between IT costs and business performance, which can be difficult to maintain. Costs which are critical here are the cost of acquiring infrastructure and the cost of its ongoing ownership.

Businesses also need the ability to adapt to changes caused by internal and external factors. This leads to a term known as business agility, which is the measure of an organisation's responsiveness to change.

There are technology innovations that have influenced cloud computing, such include:

Clustering: a group of independent IT resources interconnected and working as a single system.

Grid Computing: a platform where computing resources are organised into one or more logical pools, which are coordinated to provide a high-performance grid, sometimes referred to as "Super virtual computer".

Capacity planning: a process of determining and fulfilling future demands of an organisation's services, products and IT services.

Virtualisation: the process of converting physical IT resources into virtual resources. Resources which can be virtualised include servers, storage,networkbor power.

Containerization: a virtualisation technology that enables the creation of virtual hosting environments called containers without the need to deploy a virtual server for each solution.

Serverless Environments: This is a special runtime environment that does not require developers to deploy or provision servers.

Basic Concepts and Terminology in Cloud Computing

Cloud: a distinct IT environment that is designed to remotely provision scalable and measured IT resources.

Containers: commonly used in cloud environments to provide highly optimised virtual hosting environments capable of providing the resources required for software programs they host.

IT Resource: a physical or virtual IT service or product that can be software-based, such as a virtual server, or hardware-based, such as a network device.

On Premises: an IT resource hosted in a conventional IT enterprise within an organisational boundary and is located on the premises of the IT enterprise.

Scaling: This represents the ability of an IT resource to handle increased or decreased usage demands.

Cloud service: any IT resource that is made remotely accessible via a cloud. It can exist as a web-based software program with a technical interface invoked via the use of a messaging protocol.

Goals and benefits of adopting Cloud Computing:

Increased Responsiveness: Utilising services provided by cloud providers frees organisations from the reponsibility they would have had. It reduces the complexity of managing infrastructure environments.

Reduced Investment and Proportional Costs

The main objective of investing in cloud-based IT resources is the reduction or elimination of up-front IT investments. The ready-to-use solutions provided simplify and expedite the deployment and development of IT resources. Other benefits of cloud computing are increased scalability and availability, and reliability.

Challenges associated with Cloud computing include increased vulnerability due to overlapping trust boundaries and shared security responsibility, increased exposure to cyber threats, reduced operational governance control, cost overruns,multiregional compliance and legal issues and limited portability between cloud providers.

References

Erl, T., & Monroy, E. B. (2023). Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology, Security, and Architecture. Pearson Education. https://books.google.com.ng/books?id=kCbQEAAAQBAJ