What is cloud computing?

Question

Can someone explain in simple terms how Cloud computing works? I read the article on a Wikipedia article , but still not sure I understand how the cloud works.

Answer 1

Besides the last marketing term?

Basically, all the resources your program needs are stored “somewhere” on the Internet. You interact with them through a specific service contract; SOAP, REST, POX or something else, and what happens after that, to the service provider. You do not care about how your information is stored or how the service is provided, it just is.

If, for example, you wanted to store files, you can use the Amazon S3 cloud system. You connect to the service and upload your files; you don’t know or care about where the files are stored, but only about the location of the entry point to this service.

If you have an application, it can also run in the cloud, considering it suitable. For example, Live Mesh is a virtual machine on which you can encode and run your software both locally and inside the cloud, so your user simply navigates to the URI and finds your program, you don’t care where it is located outside the cloud.

Answer 2

First, to get rid of this: Cloud Computing is a marketing buzzword and vague (at least for now).

I would recommend analyzing this comprehensive buzzword and market segments, namely:

• IaaS : infrastructure as a service (e.g. Amazon EC2)
• Paas : Platform as a Service (e.g. Google AppEngine)
• DaaS : Database as a Service (e.g. Amazon RDS)
• SaaS : software as a service (e.g. Salesforce)

Returning to your points:

• If you provide a service through the web interface, you can classify it in the cloud computing buffer.
• Conventional per-se websites do not fall into the CC category (see segments above).
• I don’t know what a cloud application is: are you trying to define a new term ?; -)

Answer 3

Cloud computing is a hardware service (including computing, network, and storage), where:

• Services are available upon request ; customers can pay them as they become available, without having to invest in a data center.
• Hardware management abstracts from customers.
• Infrastructure capacities are flexible and can easily scale up and down.

For this simple model, there is a powerful economic power: the provision and consumption of cloud computing usually can significantly increase the efficiency of resource use compared to the hosting itself and the type of data center hosting.

A snapshot from this article on cloud computing .

Answer 4

Mostly marketing term of the hour. Ask 5 people and you will get 6 answers. I heard some people describe cloud computing as Google Docs because you store your data “in the cloud”. Others consider this rather dynamic distribution and hosting, such as Amazon EC2 or Google App Engine.

Answer 5

This term is so new that there is no accepted definition, especially because Dell (!) Does not have a trademark.

In fact, the idea is similar to the utility idea - you want electricity, but you don’t care which power station supplies it, because there is a network that supplies electricity to everyone, and you can just click on it. What works for electricity, but the Internet is not yet so sophisticated. But this is a vision.

Amazon S3 simply provides disk space, no matter who uses it or where they are located in the world. Of course, Google’s office tools (and the Microsoft web application) offer a service, not a specific machine, that will take care of your application. Again, you can create and work with a spreadsheet, but you don’t know where this spreadsheet is stored or what machine it works on - just when it is available, when you want it.

Web 2.0 is another term that is trying to find a definition, but you can present your spreadsheet using calculations that are embedded somewhere in another machine and saving the results of your calculations on Amazon S3. Borders disappear at that moment.

Since it is available wherever you enter, it can be accessed from anywhere in the world. It’s “in the cloud” because it can be seen from anywhere (not a good analogy, but ...)

Answer 6

Even something simple, such as webmail, can be considered to store our information "in the cloud." That is, the data is not stored locally, it is stored on this magical cloud thing called the Internet.

It's basically just a buzzword for storing things remotely. This list summarizes why it was used.

FTP backup => Store files in the cloud
SSHing to a remote computer to execute code => Cloud computing
Webmail => Mail
SSHing to a remote computer to execute code that predicts weather => Cloud computing through cloud computing

(I tried the html table, but it did not appear ...)

Sounds cooler, right?

Answer 7

I will explain how I understood cloud computing using a couple of examples:

Suppose you are creating a personal application for personal finance. You contact several banks with your proposal and they like the idea, but they refuse to allow you access to their servers for the web service. In cloud computing, banks can create a web service in a cloud service, such as Microsoft Azure, that will retrieve data from their server. Then you called their web service from the cloud, and not to your servers. Basically, the “cloud” on the intermediate server is managed by a reputable company such as Microsoft, IBM, Google, etc.

On the other hand, for the bank, this reduces the responsibility and cost of managing web services and the required hardware / software. If a small credit union has only storage servers and no web server, the cloud gives them the same opportunity to participate in your application as a large bank.

Thus, you can imagine the cloud as an intermediary of web services and / or data storage.

Answer 8

Cloud computing is a type of general computing that uses a large-scale computing infrastructure. In other words, powerful hardware is interconnected, often to fully realize the benefits of virtualization. This equipment can be shared by many users in the form of a common cloud or intended for a single object, since it is used in private cloud computing.

A public cloud is defined as a multi-tenant environment where you buy a “server slice” in a cloud computing environment that is shared by a number of other customers or tenants.

Private cloud computing , on the other hand, is by definition a single tenant environment where hardware, storage, and a network are for one client or company.

Answer 9

This is a computer that happens on the Internet. The idea is that instead of creating your own resources, you put your data in Cloud applications. It is assumed that this cloud has 100% availability and infinite scalability. For more details: http://vineetgupta.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!8DE4BDC896BEE1AD!1326.entry

Answer 10

None of these things make your application a cloud application. This is a cloud application if it runs in the cloud. What is a cloud?

The difference between cloud computing and distributed computing

The web site development model is usually usable in the cloud because many parts of the system are essentially parallel. However, there are various design decisions (er, bugs?) That you could make to limit the amount of parallelism that can be achieved. You can still run such a program in the cloud, but it won’t get almost such a benefit that a highly parallel application can use.

The technologies you are talking about can be used to create highly parallel applications, but this is not automatic, you still need to understand what you are doing.

Answer 11

Cloud computing is just a special way to order, use, and drop computers. It is like using banking services with an ATM or buying things from vending machines.

The purpose of cloud computing is to completely exclude any living person from the supplier.

Any other good and bad cloud computing features are just a byproduct of this idea.

Answer 12

I like this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdBd14rjcs0&feature=related

Short version: Google and Salesforce.com, among other things, sell computer space and "virtualized" application environments that let you run your program on their machines. Like shared hosting, but for programs and applications, not just for websites. This is a big buzzword because big players really push it as a way to make more money from their infrastructures and unused clock cycles. Especially in Salesforce, you can blame this latest version of "cloud computing" on them and "Force.com", as they are very active in selling their services using the term "cloud computing", and by proxy - the idea of ​​the cloud is the calculation itself.

Answer 13

I suggest you read this article

Above the clouds: Berkeley's view of cloud computing, generally armbust

There will be no doubt in your mind. In the field of research, this article is referred to as an introduction to cloud computing.

Answer 14

I think it looks like a computer that offers services offered by the clouds instead of server systems. Clouds can spread all over the world. In this way, clouds can distribute services much faster, comparing them to others.

Answer 15

Here's a good definition of what cloud computing is .