Cloud Computing

Businesses maintain their servers, whether for internal applications or public-facing web applications, at facilities known as data centers. Large businesses, larger commercial websites, or web applications offering banking, online shopping, or video streaming need many servers to deliver their content. The more popular websites and web applications have millions of users and need hundreds of servers for a better customer experience.

A website or web application with many servers needs proper installation and configuration, administration, and maintenance. The servers need a regulated power supply, efficient cooling, and a high level of security. It can be expensive and challenging for a business to manage all this, especially if it is not their core competence. Data centers are a very practical, cost-effective, and efficient solution.

While data centers offer several services to host the servers, businesses still have to buy their own servers and networking infrastructure. When applications have hundreds of thousands of users performing general tasks like reading and sending email or shopping online, it is very difficult to estimate the server capacity required. People may send more emails through the day and not much at night, people may shop more during the holidays than at other times of the year, and so on.

If you install more capacity than required it would be an unnecessary waste of money, if install less capacity than required the performance of their applications may degrade and result in customer dissatisfaction.

Cloud computing is a revolutionary solution that offers computing resources on demand. This solution addresses the problem of unpredictable or changing capacity requirements by allowing businesses to add or reduce capacity with almost literally the click of a button. Cloud computing service providers offer a pay-as-you-go pricing model so that businesses only pay for the server capacity they actually use, making it extremely easy to budget for and manage expenditure on servers where the requirements change often.

Cloud computing was pioneered by Amazon Web Services, which makes it the most popular. However, there are other cloud service providers as well. Cloud services also evolved from simply providing server capacity to offering access to applications and databases on the cloud.

There are three broad categories of cloud services offered today:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

• Software as a Service (SaaS)

• Platform as a Service (PaaS)