It’s very unlikely that you may not have heard about Cloud Computing.
If you are working as a System Admin, Infrastructure Engineer and keen to learn (you should be) about Cloud then the following will give you a basic idea.
Why Cloud Computing?
One of the first questions you can ask yourself.
Let’s say there is no cloud computing right now, and you want to host your website and have all website pages developed and ready for your laptop, now you want to make it public.
The first thing you need to do is buy physical server hardware and host in a data center with public IP address. Secondly, you need to install an operating system on the server and web services that can run your website.
Now you are ready to publish your website, but the issue is you have already invested a lot of time and money in getting your site available on the internet.
This process right from buying server hardware to hosting in a data center will cost you around 1000s of dollars and time consuming is from few days to weeks.
This was the situation 10-15 years back.
In Cloud Computing you don’t buy new server hardware. Instead, you rent it for as long as you want which can be as less as for few minutes.
Secondly, you don’t have to manage operating system and web services it is managed by cloud service provider.
You get a button to upload your website content and once data is uploaded your website is available for the public.
This process cost you around few dollars and gets ready in few minutes.
Ex: you can get it started with DigitalOcean for as less as $5 per month.
Easy life. Isn’t it?
What is Cloud Computing?
Cloud Computing is a process of accessing different type of resources over the Internet.
For example, if your data is growing, you need to buy a higher capacity disk to store your data and carry it along with you to data availability whenever you required.
However, in cloud computing, you can rent cloud storage and access it from any device connected to the internet also you pay for storage that is used.
Similarly, you can buy any infrastructure services on demand and scale up or down when necessary.
Types of Cloud Computing
There are mainly 3 type of cloud computing available today,
- Public Cloud
- Private Cloud
- Hybrid Cloud
Public Cloud – It is a standard cloud computing model where resources provided by a service provider are shared across different clients.
For example: if you rent 10GB public cloud storage, you will get requested capacity of a disk from a bigger chunk of single storage device that is logically divided into small parts and distributed to multiple users isolated to make it private across different clients.
- Scalable: resources can be increased and reduced on-demand
- Reliable: High availability model, no single point of failure
- Cost efficient: you pay only for what you use.
- Shared resources: Not a reliable privacy
- Security: it cannot be used for private and sensitive information
Private Cloud – As the name says, Private Cloud has all resources dedicated to your application. It can be either from cloud service provider or your company data center.
It gives complete control for data security and privacy. Private Cloud provides an additional layer of protection to process sensitive and confidential information.
- Better Security: resources are dedicated and not shared with anyone
- Reliable: greater performance
- Quality: with performance come quality
- Expensive: it is costlier than a public cloud and required IT expertise to manage it.
Hybrid Cloud – It is a combination of Public Cloud and Private Cloud.
You can host your public service in the Public cloud and confidential and sensitive data related services in Private Cloud.
It offers very flexible and comprehensive benefit of both models.
- Scalable: you can increase your services starting from a Public cloud and Scale to Private as per demand.
- Cost efficient: you don’t have to setup 100% infrastructure for private cloud
- Security: you can continue to run confidential processes in the Private Cloud.
- Flexible: you have a choice to choose Cloud infrastructure
- Security: There are small chances of security breaching thru public cloud.
I hope above give you an idea about it.
Next, you may want to check out this online course – Learn Cloud Computing from Scratch.