What is cloud computing ?
Cloud Computing is a process of delivering scalable, expandable and almost perfectly elastic software services using internet technologies. Rather than buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centers and servers, you'll access technology services, like computing power, storage, and databases, on an as-needed basis from a cloud provider like Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Benefits of cloud computing
- The cloud gives you quick access to a broad range of technologies so you'll innovate faster and build nearly anything that you simply can imagine. You’ll quickly spin up resources as you would like them–from infrastructure services, such as compute, storage, and databases, to Internet of Things, machine learning, data lakes and analytics, and much more. You’ll deploy technology services during a matter of minutes, and obtain from idea to implementation several orders of magnitude faster than before. This provides you the liberty to experiment, test new ideas to differentiate customer experiences, and transform your business.
- With cloud computing, you don’t need to over-provision resources up front to handle peak levels of business activity within the future. Instead, you provision the quantity of resources that you really need. You’ll scale these resources up or right down to instantly to grow and shrink capacity as your business needs change.
- The cloud allows you to trade capital expenses (such as data centers and physical servers) for variable expenses, and only buy IT as you consume it. Plus, the variable expenses are much less than what you'd pay to do it yourself due to the economies of scale.
- With the cloud, you'll expand to new geographic regions and deploy globally in minutes. For instance, AWS has infrastructure everywhere the world, so you'll deploy your application in multiple physical locations with just a couple of clicks. Putting applications in closer proximity to finish users reduces latency and improves their experience.
The wide range of services offered by cloud computing companies can be categorized into three basic types:
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). IaaS provides users access to raw computing resources such processing power, data storage capacity, and networking, within the context of a secure data center.
- Platform as a Service (PaaS). Geared toward software development teams, PaaS offerings provide computing and storage infrastructure and also a development platform layer, with components like web servers, management systems, and software development kits (SDKs) for various programming languages.
- Software as a Service (SaaS). SaaS providers offer application-level services tailored to a good variety of business needs, like customer relationship management (CRM), marketing automation, or business analytics.
