Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Introduction to Cloud Computing - Part 1.

This post will try to introduce one to the concepts of cloud computing.

What is cloud computing? What are the benefits?

Think of a business which has a website.



As the audience grows, the site will become slower and slower.
To increase the performance and speed, one can add more servers (hardware).



One can keep on adding servers but this requires a lot of money and time. Money is also spent on periodic maintenance.
Also, there could be seasons when the site may not be as active as other times. At that time, these extra servers are a liability.




What if one had an option to pay for the servers (the storage capacity) as they use and return them back as and when they did not need it?

Assume you need a sedan for an executive in your company.
To buy a sedan, one needs to fork out cash and also pay for the insurance and other things.
However, what if you need to buy a sedan for all executives of your company?

However, one also has an option to rent out a cab. You enjoy all the facilities of a sedan and pay only for the usage.








Cloud computing is like the cab service.
Pay for the usage.

Cloud computing allows users to run applications and store data online.
Scale up almost instantly. On demand!

Returning back to our first example of a company website.
In cloud computing, the company could host its website on a cloud and as the audience increases, it could get more hardware from the hardware supplier - on Demand.
It could also return the hardware when not needed and pay only for the usage.

One need not worry with the problems associated with the maintenance of the extra hardware, since the hardware is owned by another company (the supplier) and they are responsible for the same.

This series is continued in the next post: Introduction to Cloud computing - Part 2

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