You can't read a technical Web site these days without some mention of so-called cloud computing. But what this Cloud Computing is?
Cloud computing in a nutshell and for a layman is using the internet (cloud) to do whatever you do on a system.
Cloud represents the internet, cloud of online resources, cloud of services.
Cloud is a pool of virtualized systems which can be spread across the world or even in a data center. The term Cloud Computing itself consists of the platform called the Cloud and applications that are used to compute on this Cloud.
Here are some key concepts that will make it clear:
*Grid Computing
*Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
*Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
*Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
*Virtualization
*Pay per use/utility computing
Grid is essentially a Cluster of computers which are (loosely) coupled with each other. The prime job of a grid is to share a distributed job load and process it aggregately. e.g. SETI@Home (a.k.a Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence at Home), where the data captured by the SETI radio telescope is distributed across the globe to millions of home PC's so that the job can utilize the PC's free processing time and process the data and send it back.
It means that Grid computing shares the load, that helps in better efficiency (Green Tech).:-)
SaaS: In this concept, you dont have to purchase a software and install it (That swallows a lot of hard drive space). But rather make use of online resources: office applications such as Google docs, Blist, Zoho, SlideRocket (I suggest you to visit these links). You are probably already using SaaS tools such as Gmail, Hotmail and YouTube delivered via the cloud.
IaaS: IaaS is the delivery of computer infrastructure rather than purchasing it. Let us understand with the example of Amazon EC2(Elastic Compute Cloud). In EC2, you have to pay-by-use on an hourly basis. For its smallest instance it charges $0.10 per hour in which it provides 1 EC2 compute unit, 160 GB of instant storage and 1.7 GB memory on a 32-bit platform. For data transfer it charges $0.10 per GB for data transferred onto Amazon EC2 and $0.18 per GB for first 10 TB of data transferred per month (Red Hat has also partnered with Amazon to provide ready to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux with all developed and deployed, existing or new applications).
PaaS: PaaS delivers development environments as a service. You build your own applications that run on the provider's infrastructure. With PaaS, developers can build applications without installing any tools on their computer. e.g. Google App Engine or force.com.
In this whole idea, you don't have the actual resources, so obviously they are VIRTUALISED...
And you have to pay only for what you use. It's what utility computing is (pay per use)...
So Cloud Computing is a way to deliver services rather than applications completely independent of platform, independent of hardware.
This idea allows you to pay only for those resources that you use (and how much you use)...
You purchase software and hardware as a utility service.
This is my vision of cloud computing. Please comment if you don't get my point (and even if you do).
You can find more on the same topic in the following you tube video:
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