What is Cloud Computing?
In simple language Cloud computing (CC) is the delivery of computing service which includes servers, storage, databases. networking, software, analytics and intelligence over the internet. This is a broad concept which covers the different domain of technologies on both hardware and software. So It can also be technological advancement focusing on design of commuting systems, development of different applications and leverage existing services for building software.
Cloud computing and Use case Example:
CC has become such a popular buzzword nowadays that it has been used to refer to different technologies, services and concepts. It is often associated with virtualized infrastructure or hardware on demand, utility computing. IT outsourcing, platform and software as services. CC allows people and business firms to use the different infrastructure and services like virtual machines, platform, runtime environment and software on demand basis to grow their business without maintaining any infrastructure by themselves.
For example, Deerwalk Inc is the IT outsourcing company which is using CC services over the internet. They use Amazon EC2 instances to process data using Hadoop, store data on cloud databases like redshift, elasticsearch and cloud storage like amazon s3 bucket. They also use Amazon application load balancer (ALB) as the software services. Though infrastructure is in the United States employees from Nepal which is 7000 miles from here work as if they are working in their local machines. This example illustrates the concept of CC on an application basis by different companies.
Cloud Computing Definition By Armmbrust et al and NIST
There are different definitions of CC given by different people and institutions. According to Armbrust et al “Cloud computing refers to both the applications delivered as services over the Internet and the hardware and system software in the data centers that provide those services.”. According to him if someone uses application services over the internet and hardware and software system in the data center where hardware is maintained then user is using cloud computing technology. Similarly,
According to NIST (U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology). “Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.” This definition is also about the use of different infrastructure, services and computing resources without taking a headache on their management and maintenance.
References: Mastering Cloud computing book
