Recently I have attended a session on Cloud Computing and I can recall few things which may useful to get familiar with this term.
Cloud computing is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet.
These services are broadly divided into three categories:
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS),
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A cloud service has three distinct characteristics that differentiate it from traditional
hosting. It is sold on demand, typically by the minute or the hour;
it is elastic -- a user can have as much or as little of a service as they want at any
given time; and the service is fully managed by the provider (the consumer needs nothing
but a personal computer and Internet access). Significant innovations in virtualization
and distributed computing, as well as improved access to high-speed Internet and a weak
economy, have accelerated interest in cloud computing.
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
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A cloud can be private or public. A public cloud sells services to anyone on the Internet. (Currently, Amazon Web Services is
the largest public cloud provider.) A private cloud is a proprietary network or a data center that supplies hosted services
to a limited number of people. When a service provider uses public cloud resources to create their private cloud, the result
is called a virtual private cloud. Private or public, the goal of cloud computing is to provide easy, scalable access to
computing resources and IT services.
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
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Infrastructure-as-a-Service like Amazon Web Services provides virtual server instances with unique IP addresses and blocks
of storage on demand. Customers use the provider's application program interface (API) to start, stop, access and configure
their virtual servers and storage. In the enterprise, cloud computing allows a company to pay for only as much capacity as
is needed, and bring more online as soon as required. Because this pay-for-what-you-use model resembles the way electricity,
fuel and water are consumed, it's sometimes referred to as utility computing.
In the software-as-a-service cloud model, the vendor supplies the hardware infrastructure, the software product and
interacts with the user through a front-end portal. SaaS is a very broad market. Services can be anything from Web-based
email to inventory control and database processing. Because the service provider hosts both the application and the data,
the end user is free to use the service from anywhere.
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