What is Cloud Computing?

Before entering into the world of Cloud Computing, we must have knowledge about the In-Premises Datacenter. In-premises DC means you will have a proper room with equipped devices like Servers, Networking Devices, Storage Devices, Power Devices, and Cooling Devices etc. And for that you need Cost and it is of two types CaPex and OPex.

CaPex means you need a Capital Investment at the time of setting up your DC for purchasing the devices or etc. While OPex stands for Operational Cost which you are requiring during your maintenance of DC like if there is any failure in devices, electricity costs, maintenance cost, etc.

The OPex can be planned or unplanned. If there is any failure at DC then it will make your running services down.

The In-premises DC includes lots of things like Cost, Effort, Maintenance and monitoring etc.

Now let’s have a look to Cloud Computing. It is basically a model of IT infrastructure where you can use or retrieve resources over internet through web-bases tools irrespective if underlying it. If we talk about Azure then you can access it via its portal “portal.azure.com” to access its resources. Let’s have a look to below images to understand how a user access it resource.

If you will see above screen then you can see that “Central India” is DC for Azure which is connected to Internet and exposed to “portal.azure.com”. So if any user on internet looking for an application. He can go to Azure portal via internet and can build a VM and install application and accordingly he can pay to Microsoft. So user don’t need to buy any hardware and other stuffs related to In-premise DC.

If you want to define the Cloud Computing then it is delivery of computing services like serves, storage, networking, software, applications etc. over internet “in cloud”. This is always available on demand. You don’t look for buying hardware, installing and configuring it. You need to just look for your requirement and buy it.

It has three types of deployment models.

Public Cloud: Services are available to users over internet.

Private Cloud: Cloud infrastructure configured solely for an organization.

Hybrid Cloud: This includes both clouds private and public and where data can be accessed between them.

Let’s have go through some benefits of Cloud Computing.

1. The important thing is that you need to pay what you are using as pay-as-you-go subscription. So you can optimize your cost as per your application requirement. Like if you are using any VM or application for some hours and now you don’t need it. You can delete that and pay what you have used.
2. The other important benefit is Scalability. Your resources are liable to scale up and scale down as per your requirement in a matter of time. You don’t need to look for quotes of hardware to buy and install it. This is of two types: Horizontal and Vertical. Vertical scaling means you can increase or decrease your hardware like RAM, CPU etc. when you needed. In case of horizontal scaling, you can take an example of web application. If your application is running over two machine and in a matter of time your utilization increases then you can go ahead and add one or two more VMs to scale it up. And when its utilization is normal you can release them also. Here you need to pay for the extra VMs only for that time.
3. You can configure required security and also enhance it by lot services provided by Cloud Services. There are lots of agencies which always audits cloud services.
4. You can also configure scaling automatically so that your intervention is not required at the time of need. This is called Elasticity. There is a small difference between elasticity and scaling and that is it. Elasticity has the ability to adjust the resources as per your requirement.
5. It is reliable for data security, availability etc.