Cloud computing means Internet based computing mechanism where Software, Hardware and other resources which are available in shared mode and can be utilized as and when required. These are virtual resources which offer dynamic scalability over the web – this is the essence of the Cloud computing.
There are many cloud services that can be envisioned, but the main ones are IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service), PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service), and SaaS (Software-as-a-Service).
Consider this scenario:
You have an E-Commerce application which sales grocery products. You have deployed it on a dedicated server which has high CPU speed, high memory and necessary disk space. You noticed that you have major traffic on your website every evening at around 6 to 8 PM and on weekends. During this period you receive 70% of your orders. Still there are many customers who would not order on your website due to over-traffic and connectivity issues. Either you need to add a new server or need to leave that chunk of business.
Here, Cloud Computing gives you the flexibility where in you can select extra resources for your peak business hours (which are 6 to 8 PM and the weekends in this case), there by avoiding the need of extra full-time servers for managing extra traffic. This way you will be able to save dollars on your hardware and infrastructure cost and keep your clients happy by giving them needed speed and better user experience.
Cloud computing offers great value in such situations.
Cloud at its best:
We are close to that virtual world where-in we will have very light-weight PCs and all the useful local machine data will be stored in some kind of a cloud, thereby giving access to the data 24×7, 365 days from any location. Web is going to be significantly different and more effective.
Cloud and SaaS:
If you are using a SaaS model application, you don’t need to buy that application. Instead, you only need to pay a subscription fee. You need not to worry about the maintenance of that application or server where it is hosted. All you need to do is to pay your subscription fee and start using that application. SaaS application providers host it on a set of servers and sell its subscriptions to the various customers. Tomorrow, if you come and ask the SaaS provider that you need to have an account for your additional few hundreds of employees for the same SaaS application you’re using, they will change it from SaaS model to the Cloud Computing. This is how Google works.
Cloud development tools:
Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 has cloud development tools which allows the developers to write their cloud centric web applications and services. Developing scalable web applications and services have become easier now and can be tested on Windows Azure simulation environment.
Microsoft SQL Azure is a cloud based relational database service built on SQL Server technology. It provides highly scalable database service.
Interesting thing is that, any existing ASP.Net application can be converted to cloud application in few steps, with the help of above tools. See here
Summary:
Cloud computing is a fantastic approach to manage your business applications. It’s really helpful to small, medium and big sized organizations to manage their data and infrastructure securely, easily and in cost effective fashion. HP, IBM, VMware, Amazon, Google and Microsoft are extensively using cloud computing. In fact they are cloud service providers as well.
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