“Cloud Computing” We hear that term quite often these days, and many of us wonder what exactly it means. How exactly is it bringing the revolution to modern day computing? Is it really beneficial?
Well, to be frank, initially even I was pretty much confused about the real meaning of it, and I was really searching for the right answers to these questions. On the Internet, when you type in the term “Cloud Computing” on your Google Search Engine, Bing, Yahoo, or whatever you use, you’ll find many articles, and ‘wiki’ pages on it, with almost all of them either too complex to understand, or too different in terms of approaches being considered in order to explain its real meaning. Whatever it was, certainly took me some time to understand and formulate the real meaning of it.
Cloud Computing can be defined as the advancement in the concept of delivering of hosted service on the Internet. These services could be Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), and Platform-as-a-Service (Paas). The term ‘Cloud’ here is actually used as a ‘metaphor’, usually used to represent the ever-growing size of the Internet, and multiple servers connected in a network.
There are several benefits of Cloud Computing:
- The power of computing can be increased by increasing the size of the cloud (i.e. by adding more virtual servers temporarily to the cloud present within a network), at any instant of time to fulfill the urgent demand of bandwidth, and can be removed easily as soon as the demand is fulfilled. Hence, there’s no need to buy too many servers or other hardware devices, thus, making it a cost-effective solution.
- Its cost-effectiveness, and low-power usage also makes it a ‘Green’ solution. As most of the hosted services would require only a minimal number of servers to fulfill the average bandwidth demand, and further demand can be fulfilled with cloud power, the power-usage for those extra servers can be saved, as they don’t need to be switched on all the time, but only in certain situations when the demand is high.
- Cloud computing makes it easier to backup, and maintain data, and services hosted on the servers. Examples could be GMail, Hotmail, Google App Engine, Google Docs, Salesforce, Amazon etc. All big organizations are switching to cloud computing due to its multiple advantages.
- From’s the users or client-side perspective, the cost for running heavy applications, which required high-end hardware devices, and software licenses, can be saved. Even a standard computer with a web-browser installed in it, can effectively use the services hosted on cloud powered sites/servers, as if they were installed on that particular system locally. The examples, as mentioned above, are Email services like GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo, and Office-applications like Google Docs, etc.
Below is a video I find really helpful in understanding the concept of cloud computing, from a beginner’s point of view. The way with which it was explained, was the best I found on the Internet till date. I really admire the creativity of the person who developed that video, with lots of unique ideas flowing. I do recommend to watch this video at least once, and I bet you’re gonna enjoy this for sure.
[vsw id="QJncFirhjPg" source="youtube" width="480" height="270" autoplay="no"]
Video Source Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJncFirhjPg
However, despite all its advantages, a doubt certainly arises about the reliability factor of cloud technology. Recently, there was a situation where the email accounts of a small percentage of GMail, and Hotmail users, were totally wiped out, as if they were newly created. Google, though, stated that it was because of some software glitch, and they are taking initiatives to recover all the wiped accounts. But, this certainly puts a question mark on its reliability, as all the user’s data is stored and handled on remote servers, and storage of important and critical data on those servers is certainly not risk-free. I’d surely like to know your opinion about it.