What is Cloud Computing?

According to Wikipedia, Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a metered service over a network (typically the Internet).

Computing cloud provides software, computation, and storage resources and data access without even requiring the users to know the location and other details of the computing infrastructure.

It was also mentioned in Wikipedia that the end users of cloud computing uses web browser or mobile application while the software is stored and is accessible to servers at a remote location.

Some of the characteristics that a cloud computing have are:

1. Empowerment. It is the empowerment of the end users that has full control over the provisioning of the resources.

2. Agility. It is improved when the user has the ability to re-provision immediately the technological infrastructure resources.

3. Application programming interface (API). The ability to access software that enables machines to interact with cloud software in the same way, the computer facilitates the interaction between the human and computers. Cloud computing is considered REST-based APIs.

4. Cost. Cost is reduced. In public cloud delivery model, the so-called capital expenditure is transformed to operational expenditure.

5. Device and Location independence. It is enabling the users to use any device in any location to access systems.

6. Virtualization. The sharing and utilization is increased. The applications can be migrated from one server to another.

7. Muti-tenancy. There is sharing of resources and costs.

8. Reliability. It will be improved if multiple sites have been used already.

9. Scalability and Elasticity. Provisioning of resources without much hassle.

10. Performance. It will be monitored. And it is consistent using web services.

11. Security. It could be improved due to, increased security-focused resources, centralization of data, etc., but concerns can persist about loss of control over some sensitive data. Security is often as good as or better than other traditional systems, in part because providers are able to devote resources to solving security issues that many customers cannot afford.

12. Maintenance. Maintaining cloud computing applications is easier because there is no need to go somewhere else, or to any far places and there is no need for installation on the computer.

Short History

The term “cloud” was described like the internet, and it represents like telephone network.

John McCarthy during 1960s spoke out about cloud computing, he said that someday computation will soon be a public utility.