Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing tutorial provides basic and advanced concepts of Cloud Computing. Our
Cloud Computing tutorial is designed for beginners and professionals.

Cloud computing is a virtualization-based technology that allows us to create, configure, and

customize applications via an internet connection. The cloud technology includes a
development platform, hard disk, software application, and database.

What is Cloud Computing

The term cloud refers to a network or the internet. It is a technology that uses remote servers
on the internet to store, manage, and access data online rather than local drives. The data can
be anything such as files, images, documents, audio, video, and more.

There are the following operations that we can do using cloud computing:

o Developing new applications and services

o Storage, back up, and recovery of data
o Hosting blogs and websites
o Delivery of software on demand
o Analysis of data
o Streaming videos and audios

Why Cloud Computing?

Small as well as large IT companies, follow the traditional methods to provide the IT
infrastructure. That means for any IT company, we need a Server Room that is the basic
need of IT companies.

In that server room, there should be a database server, mail server, networking, firewalls,
routers, modem, switches, QPS (Query Per Second means how much queries or load will be
handled by the server), configurable system, high net speed, and the maintenance engineers.
To establish such IT infrastructure, we need to spend lots of money. To overcome all these
problems and to reduce the IT infrastructure cost, Cloud Computing comes into existence.

Characteristics of Cloud Computing

The characteristics of cloud computing are given below:

1) Agility

The cloud works in a distributed computing environment. It shares resources among users
and works very fast.

2) High availability and reliability

The availability of servers is high and more reliable because the chances of infrastructure
failure are minimum.

3) High Scalability

Cloud offers "on-demand" provisioning of resources on a large scale, without having

engineers for peak loads.

4) Multi-Sharing

With the help of cloud computing, multiple users and applications can work more
efficiently with cost reductions by sharing common infrastructure.
5) Device and Location Independence

Cloud computing enables the users to access systems using a web browser regardless of their
location or what device they use e.g. PC, mobile phone, etc. As infrastructure is off-
site (typically provided by a third-party) and accessed via the Internet, users can connect
from anywhere.

6) Maintenance

Maintenance of cloud computing applications is easier, since they do not need to be

installed on each user's computer and can be accessed from different places. So, it
reduces the cost also.

7) Low Cost

By using cloud computing, the cost will be reduced because to take the services of cloud
computing, IT company need not to set its own infrastructure and pay-as-per usage of
resources.

8) Services in the pay-per-use mode

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are provided to the users so that they can
access services on the cloud by using these APIs and pay the charges as per the usage of
services.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Cloud Computing

Advantages of Cloud Computing

As we all know that Cloud computing is trending technology. Almost every company
switched their services on the cloud to rise the company growth.

Here, we are going to discuss some important advantages of Cloud Computing-

1) Back-up and restore data

Once the data is stored in the cloud, it is easier to get back-up and restore that data using the
cloud.

2) Improved collaboration

Cloud applications improve collaboration by allowing groups of people to quickly and easily
share information in the cloud via shared storage.

3) Excellent accessibility

Cloud allows us to quickly and easily access store information anywhere, anytime in the
whole world, using an internet connection. An internet cloud infrastructure increases
organization productivity and efficiency by ensuring that our data is always accessible.

4) Low maintenance cost

Cloud computing reduces both hardware and software maintenance costs for organizations.

5) Mobility

Cloud computing allows us to easily access all cloud data via mobile.
6) IServices in the pay-per-use model

Cloud computing offers Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to the users for access
services on the cloud and pays the charges as per the usage of service.

7) Unlimited storage capacity

Cloud offers us a huge amount of storing capacity for storing our important data such as
documents, images, audio, video, etc. in one place.

8) Data security

Data security is one of the biggest advantages of cloud computing. Cloud offers many
advanced features related to security and ensures that data is securely stored and handled.

Disadvantages of Cloud Computing

A list of the disadvantage of cloud computing is given below -

1) Internet Connectivity

As you know, in cloud computing, every data (image, audio, video, etc.) is stored on the
cloud, and we access these data through the cloud by using the internet connection. If you do
not have good internet connectivity, you cannot access these data. However, we have no any
other way to access data from the cloud.

2) Vendor lock-in

Vendor lock-in is the biggest disadvantage of cloud computing. Organizations may face
problems when transferring their services from one vendor to another. As different vendors
provide different platforms, that can cause difficulty moving from one cloud to another.

3) Limited Control

As we know, cloud infrastructure is completely owned, managed, and monitored by the

service provider, so the cloud users have less control over the function and execution of
services within a cloud infrastructure.

4) Security

Although cloud service providers implement the best security standards to store important
information. But, before adopting cloud technology, you should be aware that you will be
sending all your organization's sensitive information to a third party, i.e., a cloud computing
service provider. While sending the data on the cloud, there may be a chance that your
organization's information is hacked by Hackers.
History of Cloud Computing

Before emerging the cloud computing, there was Client/Server computing which is basically
a centralized storage in which all the software applications, all the data and all the controls
are resided on the server side.

If a single user wants to access specific data or run a program, he/she need to connect to the
server and then gain appropriate access, and then he/she can do his/her business.

Then after, distributed computing came into picture, where all the computers are networked
together and share their resources when needed.

On the basis of above computing, there was emerged of cloud computing concepts that
later implemented.

At around in 1961, John MacCharty suggested in a speech at MIT that computing can be sold
like a utility, just like a water or electricity. It was a brilliant idea, but like all brilliant ideas, it
was ahead if its time, as for the next few decades, despite interest in the model, the
technology simply was not ready for it.

But of course time has passed and the technology caught that idea and after few years we
mentioned that:

In 1999, Salesforce.com started delivering of applications to users using a simple website.

The applications were delivered to enterprises over the Internet, and this way the dream of
computing sold as utility were true.

In 2002, Amazon started Amazon Web Services, providing services like storage, computation
and even human intelligence. However, only starting with the launch of the Elastic Compute
Cloud in 2006 a truly commercial service open to everybody existed.

In 2009, Google Apps also started to provide cloud computing enterprise applications.

Of course, all the big players are present in the cloud computing evolution, some were earlier,
some were later. In 2009, Microsoft launched Windows Azure, and companies like Oracle
and HP have all joined the game. This proves that today, cloud computing has become
mainstream.

Cloud Computing Architecture

As we know, cloud computing technology is used by both small and large
organizations to store the information in cloud and access it from anywhere at
anytime using the internet connection.

Cloud computing architecture is a combination of service-oriented

architecture and event-driven architecture.

Cloud computing architecture is divided into the following two parts -

o Front End
o Back End

The below diagram shows the architecture of cloud computing -

Front End
The front end is used by the client. It contains client-side interfaces and applications
that are required to access the cloud computing platforms. The front end includes
web servers (including Chrome, Firefox, internet explorer, etc.), thin & fat clients,
tablets, and mobile devices.

Back End
The back end is used by the service provider. It manages all the resources that are
required to provide cloud computing services. It includes a huge amount of data
storage, security mechanism, virtual machines, deploying models, servers, traffic
control mechanisms, etc.

Note: Both front end and back end are connected to others through a network, generally
using the internet connection.
Components of Cloud Computing Architecture
There are the following components of cloud computing architecture -

1. Client Infrastructure

Client Infrastructure is a Front end component. It provides GUI (Graphical User

Interface) to interact with the cloud.

2. Application

The application may be any software or platform that a client wants to access.

3. Service

A Cloud Services manages that which type of service you access according to the
client’s requirement.

Cloud computing offers the following three type of services:

i. Software as a Service (SaaS) – It is also known as cloud application services.

Mostly, SaaS applications run directly through the web browser means we do not
require to download and install these applications. Some important example of SaaS
is given below –

Example: Google Apps, Salesforce Dropbox, Slack, Hubspot, Cisco WebEx.

ii. Platform as a Service (PaaS) – It is also known as cloud platform services. It is

quite similar to SaaS, but the difference is that PaaS provides a platform for software
creation, but using SaaS, we can access software over the internet without the need
of any platform.

Example: Windows Azure, Force.com, Magento Commerce Cloud, OpenShift.

iii. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – It is also known as cloud infrastructure

services. It is responsible for managing applications data, middleware, and runtime
environments.

Example: Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2, Google Compute Engine (GCE), Cisco
Metapod.

4. Runtime Cloud

Runtime Cloud provides the execution and runtime environment to the virtual
machines.
5. Storage

Storage is one of the most important components of cloud computing. It provides a

huge amount of storage capacity in the cloud to store and manage data.

6. Infrastructure

It provides services on the host level, application level, and network level. Cloud
infrastructure includes hardware and software components such as servers, storage,
network devices, virtualization software, and other storage resources that are needed
to support the cloud computing model.

7. Management

Management is used to manage components such as application, service, runtime

cloud, storage, infrastructure, and other security issues in the backend and establish
coordination between them.

8. Security

Security is an in-built back end component of cloud computing. It implements a

security mechanism in the back end.

9. Internet

The Internet is medium through which front end and back end can interact and
communicate with each other.