Cloud Computing- The future of computing? – Part I

Cloud Computing – A buzz word that is murmured everywhere by the IT folks or even non-IT people recently. This article describes what it really means to the beginners those who are interested or looking into cloud computing.

Cloud computing is a computing model where the infrastructure and the application (even the platform) is offered as a service over the Internet. The infrastructure cloud could include servers and storage and the application cloud includes various applications such as web and databases.

Even though cloud computing can be classified into many different types the major ones are Public clouds, Private clouds and Hybrid clouds.

Public clouds – As the name suggests, it is usually offered by a company who has invested a lot building their datacenter and offering a part of its infrastructure and platform for a monthly fee. Amazon, Terremark, RackSpace and Google are great examples of public clouds

Private clouds – This is something that enterprises build by themselves to be utilized across their organization. This allows them to consolidate their servers (and storage) as a single entity that can be offered to their different business units as needed. There is an interesting article from Network World can be found here.

Hybrid clouds – This is an emerging area of cloud computing where the private and public clouds can be integrated. There are many factors such as security and application compatibility needs to be considered in this model

Driving factors for cloud:

The recent developments in the virtualization technology gave a big boost to cloud computing. There are many reasons that drive the cloud computing. Some of them are,
Rapid deployment of servers and applications
Easier scalability
Allowing IT to run as a cost center by running multiple datacenters as single entity which can be shared and charged back based on usage
Cost efficient pay as you go pricing model

Apart from its benefits, there are still few concerns about the security, compliance and the application compatibility with cloud computing. However, they are being addressed by the cloud vendors.

Let’s look into some of the cloud services in-depth in Part II