The most advanced brain in the animal world, our never-ending thirst for knowledge, our pursuit of a better life & a better society, and the indomitable human enterprise have made us the dominant species on Earth. And technology exemplifies the best of human potential. Tech has changed in every possible way. Information and communication were never easier to access, thanks to the rise of electronic, computer science, and information technology. Today, you can access information, educate yourself, order food & beverages, avail transport, seek healthcare, transfer money and do nearly anything with all-pervasive lightning-fast electronic communication and data processing.
Today’s discussion focuses on one of the latest & most prominent evolution of electronics and information technology, cloud computing.
An Overview of Cloud Computing
In layperson’s terms, cloud computing delivers computational services to clients online. A better definition can be
Cloud computing is a model or system for enabling and delivering on-demand & online access to a pool of shared computing resources, such as hardware infrastructure, virtual environments, software services, storage, network, etc.
Cloud computing services can be easily provisioned and require minimal management or supervision from the client or the provider.
Perpetual, all-pervasive, fast, safe, and elastic are some key features of cloud computing that have made it ubiquitous across all business sectors. The chief idea is to provide scalable and powerful computing resources in an entirely virtualized manner. You can run any program, file, application and the like in a virtual environment or even avail large-scale computing power remotely.
Like electricity, gas, and mobile communication, cloud computing service offer computing or processing power as a utility. The biggest cloud computing service providers (according to PC Magazine) in the world (Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure) offer cloud computing through a “pay as you go” business model, where users pay extra for larger amounts and specialized services.
Cloud computing is utility computing at scale. To provide seamless and undisrupted computing resources, the backend infrastructure of cloud computing systems needs to be immensely robust, scalable, persistent, and flexible.
At the same time, they must be easily available, versatile and economical.
Immense advancements in virtualization technology are the main reasons behind the immense success of cloud computing. Virtualization of computational, storage, and networking hardware, the rise of distributed computing systems and non-structured data storage & file systems are why cloud computing services are elastic, self-managing, easily available & perpetually accessible, and efficient.
Abstraction and virtualization are two central concepts in cloud computing.
Abstraction is about hiding the convoluted, technical details from the user and providing users with convenient & intuitive interfaces. Thanks to abstraction in cloud computing, processes run on remote applications while access and administration are outsourced to the client.
Virtualization uses abstraction to create virtual environments by pooling and sharing different resources. Systems, storage, and other resources are provisioned from a centralized or distributed infrastructure with high scalability, elasticity, and perpetuity. Costs are generally assessed on a metered basis.
Let’s now look at the generic cloud computing architecture that forms the basis of specialized models.
The Cloud Computing Architecture
Despite what some may think, providing computing services from a centralized architecture is not new. The 1960s witnessed the mainframe timesharing technology, where different tasks were carried out on a single mainframe architecture using techniques similar to time division multiplexing.
Virtualization and the rise of distributed systems have changed things immensely. They have led to better resource utilization, increased energy efficiency, lower overhead, high availability, and faster disaster recovery. With an abstraction layer acting as the service component interface and drastic developments in network communication, virtualized cloud infrastructure began successful deployment across several sectors.
Here’s a look at a simplified version of modern cloud computing services.
Today, cloud management interfaces can be accessed via APIs, web services, applications, etc. It is this interface that is the service and cloud management layer.
Wish to dig deeper into the cloud computing architecture? Then Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology & Architecture from Pearson Education is a great book to boost your ideas. But, if your struggles with your assignments seem endless, connect with experts from reputed cloud computing assignment help services.
Different Cloud Computing Deployment & Service Models
With cloud computing, people and business can focus on what’s important and forget all about procuring, running, repairing, and maintaining the necessary infrastructure. Today, different kinds of cloud computing models and deployment strategies are involved.
A private cloud is designed for operations within a particular organization.
A public cloud system offers different computing resources, free or at certain rates.
A hybrid cloud system is a combination of public and private cloud services.
Community cloud services allow sharing computing resources, generally for free, among a public community.
Cloud computing service models define how cloud services are presented to clients. Different clients have different requirements, and services must be capable, scalable, flexible, and robust enough to provide seamless and undisrupted services to one & all.
The infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model provides a client with varied components of cloud infrastructure. This may include different computing resources such as storage, networks, firewalls, virtual machines, load balancers, etc.
IaaS offers access to the lowest level of software that interfaces directly with the hardware.
The platform-as-a-service (PaaS) model offers a pre-rendered virtualization environment, developmental tools, databases, web servers, etc., for a specific purpose. Generally, platform-as-a-service models offer an API to access and manage development platforms. PaaS clients do not need to worry about the underlying infrastructure.
The software-as-a-service (SaaS) are ready-to-use online software application solutions. Service providers exert complete control over the backend operations of the application software while clients get to avail of just the services.
The key difference between PaaS and SaaS is that while the former offers an environment for development, the latter provides readymade applications to clients.
Well, that about wraps up this write-up. I hope it was an insightful read. Cloud computing is a tech-heavy subject, so make sure your computer science & software engineering concepts are solid enough. Work hard and, when necessary, get expert help from reputed academic service providers who offer quality cloud computing assignment help, database assignment help, etc.
All the best!
Author-Bio: Thomas Bergeron is a database engineer with a major cloud computing service provider in London, UK. He is also a part-time writer and subject matter expert with MyAssignmenthelp.com, one of the UK’s largest academic service providers.
